Analysis of small group interactions in a seamless language learning environment: An artifact-oriented approach

Abstract

We present a study in “Move, Idioms!”, a mobile Chinese Language learning approach that emphasizes learner created content and contextualized meaning making with their daily encounters. Students used smart-phones on a 1:1, 24x7 basis to capture photos of the real-life contexts pertaining to Chinese idioms or conjunctions, made sentences with idioms/conjunctions, and posted them onto a wiki space for peer review. This paper focuses on students’ on-campus face-to-face collaborative learning process. We derive a novel visualization approach for descriptive analysis of the small group activities inspired by the notions of mediation by artifacts and distributed cognition to provide a synoptic view of the process of student artifact co-creation in such collaborative activities. The artifact-oriented analysis and visualization approach is our preliminary attempt in making sense of how the seamless learning process may look like in the perspective of learners’ individual and collaborative learning experiences.