I have recently made contact with Dr. Laurent Fillietaz, from the University of Geneva who is currently doing work at Griffith University with my PhD supervisor, Dr. Stephen Billett. Laurent has been using discourse analysis to understand how apprentices learn a trade. A paper with on situated trajectories co-authored with Ingrid de St.Georges provides an example of his work.
As a result of reading up on Laurent’s work, I have been exploring the area of multi-modal discourse analysis where there will be a workshop in Wellington and a one day conference in Auckland. The Languages in the workplace project is based at the University of Victoria in Wellington and led by Dr. Janet Holmes. Presentations in Auckland centre around the work of Dr. Theo Van Leeuwen and Dr. Rodney Jones with the conference convened by Dr. Sigrid Norris. So there is a good range of people & their work to catch up on!
The London Mobile learning group has a good resource of publications which I will be reading through over the next few weeks. I am keen to follow through on the use of mobile technology to help inform vocational educators about how their students learn in both on-job & off-job contexts. I have been reflecting on how to study the multi-literacies and multimodal means of learning which are involved in learning a trade. Mobile technologies provide for one avenue towards providing a means to collect evidence of skills learning. There is a need to drill deeper into the ‘hidden lives of learners’ in non-formalised learning settings. My goal is to try to better understand how learners learn skills, knowledge and attitudes which lead eventually to becoming skilled crafts people and trades persons. Then perhaps to investigate the current disconnect between how skills are learnt and how they are assessed using competency based assessments. There has to be a more authentic, less time consuming and effective method than what is currently the accepted practice which is heavily reliant on paper-based evidence.
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