Sanna-Kaisa
For Sanna-Kaisa, the target group consists of underage pupils to be (or to get them) interested in exploring and understanding a foreign language and culture.
You already participated in a project to test Finnish students’ knowledge on German culture and language: http://www03.edu.fi/oppimateriaalit/puutarhatonttu/ (the material seems a bit outdated, though; East and West Germany are already united 😉 )
The approach here is behavioristic, with straightforward tests and rewards, which is a form that is easier to implement than problem-solving approaches and does not require an elaborate software-environment or a community of dedicated users to be online.
Questions could be:
- What should be ‘learned’, what kind of behavioral modification is striven for in the first place?
- What kind of transfer of the learned knowledge, competences, skills is wished for?
- What form does the acquired knowledge have, can it be tested and (socially) rewarded somehow?
- What medial format can the instructions have, how can a task, challenge or problem be applied to this format?
Cultures and languages are our way of making sense of our reality, so it’s very hard to see them as arbitrary constructs because our whole social existence depends on them (see e.g. Berger & Luckman “Social Construction of Reality” or Maturana & Varela “The Tree of Knowledge”).
What intrigues us, if we travel to foreign countries? What stays in our memory?
Usually it’s not the similarities (especially if you’re young), but the strange differences:
The Germans have words for 1, 2, 3, they love football, they like to travel… but some things they do very differently from a Fin in the same situation.
From a cognitivistic or even constructivist point of view, a good introduction to a foreign culture would be to present it as a puzzle, a mystery to be solved by an intrepid traveller (or viewer, or internet-user). There would be more than one way to solve this puzzle (as in real life), and the ‘lesson’ would be a successful one if it is deemed to be retold as a nice story by the learner (“Do you know – that in Germany they do X instead of Y?”). Goal of a game could be to find out what the difference is, why it is there, or what it does mean.
There is a highly successful video-clip series produced by ARTE-TV, “Karambolage”, a german-french-co-production, that in the end always presents a small puzzle, a mystery for explaining the subtle or open differences between Germany and France. Main topics were always a small, intriguing differences between the two countries.
http://videos.arte.tv/de/videos/karambolage-sendung-vom-04-november-2012–7033412.html
A typical puzzle can be seen at Minute 9:43 – where does this small scene, 30 seconds long, happens – in Germany or in France?
Recommendations to read and view:
- Watzlawick’s examples for cultural differences in interpreting social behavior (Dropbox)
- Situated Cognition, a constructivist approach to learning
- A BBC-video about the Himba-tribe and their different words for colors
- The same phenomenon, a comic strip by John T. McCutcheon (1912): “Things Don’t Seem Wonderful If You’ve Seen Them All Your Life”. The different thing is more intriguing than the known thing – and this depends on culture, on age, on gender, on class…
Ville
For Ville, these are employees that have to read regularly updated instructions to spare their employer the costs of maloperation. If reading the instruction isn’t embedded in a more complex set of desired behavior, but is an isolated, repeated task with only content changing and no further transfer needed, I think a gamification approach, mostly based on behavioristic principles of reward, may be best suited.
Questions could be:
- What should be ‘learned’, what kind of behavioral modification is striven for in the first place?
- Is the depth of acquired knowledge from the instruction as important as getting the employees to red the instructions at all?
- What form does the acquired knowledge have, when the instruction has been read, how can this form be tested an rewarded?
- What medial format does the instructions have, how can a stimulus be technically applied to this format?
- What would be the best ‘reinforcers’, the most fitting rewards for the wished for behavior? (caveat: a reward may loose its motivating appeal over time)
