People I meet for my blog are just extraordinary, so every time I am very grateful that despite of their busy schedules they agreed to meet with me.
My next interview was with Jesper Tække, he found just half an hour for meeting with me, but I discovered so much from him. And today I want to share this interesting information with you.
Jesper is an associate professor at Aarhus University, from 2003 when he started his PhD, he studied media studies. Jesper is an internet researcher.
He is a very clever person, he wrote a book in 2008 about Niklas Luhmann with his colleague Michael Eric Paulsen, it called “Luhmann og organisation”. I was interested to know about Luhmann and tried to read his ideas, but it was too difficult for me to understand. So I was relieved when Jesper suggested to talk about his school project.
In 2011 with Michael Paulsen he started Socio Media Education project in high school. They will publish a book about their research, and Jesper was very kind to share some information with me.
They were inspired to start this project by one interview, where a student told how much he wanted a laptop, but when finally he got it, he stopped studying, internet took all his time and attention, it was already an addiction. Jesper and Michael started to interview some Danish pupils and they discovered that it is true, students played computer games or spend time in social networks, and it was hard for them to catch information from lessons.
Also Jesper interviewed teachers and he discovered that teachers have two ways of solving internet problem: or to ignore it, or to forbid.
At this time they read an article about research where it was said that using twitter and other social networks can be good, it can increase grades and responsibility from students. But it didn’t say how exactly such results were achieved.
So they had several ideas about achieving good results, now they finished second year of the research and they still have one year.
On first year of their research they were working with teachers’ attitude. For teachers it was difficult to change their way of teaching, they didn’t like an idea to inspire pupils to use twitter on lessons.
Jesper told me about experiments they did.
Firstly, teachers initiated using Twitter groups for brain storms. Pupils had to discuss books they read and then they had some bright ideas afterwards.
Also on one of the lessons a teacher motivated pupils to use Twitter during watching movie. The movie was complex with a lot of characters and pupils had to write notes during movie review. The teacher also was on Twitter group, he started discussion, and ask questions, as ”What do you think about this character, what he is going to do?” etc. Not all pupils could follow movie and type at the same time, but they could read others’ notes. In the end it appeared that pupils understood the movie better. And pupils had also notes that they could use afterwards.
On another lesson the teacher didn’t initiate using Twitter. It was another complex movie, and most of the pupils played computer games or used facebook, the rest of the students were so relax, they almost were sleeping. And, of course, they didn’t understand plot of the movie.
The goal for the first year of research was also to explain pupils how our attention works
The second year was about cultivation of connections with surrounding world. Before what teacher said was right, but nowadays pupils don’t agree so easily with dogmas. They look for information in internet and can disagree with teachers. So new focus for second year of research was to go out from classrooms. For example, pupils read a poem of a Danish writer, and then they contact him on Twitter and talked with him about his composition: what did he meant when he wrote those lines, where did he get idea from etc.
The task for the last year of research is to contact other classes who study the same topics during school education. The goal is to help pupils to build personal networking before entering university.
As you see Jesper and his colleague do a great job, and hope I will know more about results of their work. Meanwhile, you also can follow news from Jesper on his personal website.
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