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LGC that could occur in any physical or virtual space, with individual learners having greater control over what and
how they learn (Sharples, Taylor, & Vavoula, 2007). In the context of our study, what we have strived to achieve is
to facilitate the students in enacting holistic, seamless learning experiences that are rooted in such notions, with the
exploitation of both the mobile affordances of mobility and personalization.
What roles did the technology play in “Move, Idioms!”? At first glance, the smartphones seemed to be used in a
minimalist way – for photo taking, sentence making and artifact uploading. However, it was our learning design that
helped the students in maximizing their learning by exploiting the affordances of mobile learning—mobility and
personalization. The instant playback feature of the built-in camera enabled one to check a photo immediately after
shooting, and decided whether a retake was needed to make sure her idea was correctly executed and the idiom
association was appropriate. In some rare cases, checking the playback might even instantly trigger new ideas (e.g.,
Figure 3a and Figure 3b).
Through our analysis of student artifacts and the post-interviews, we have also noticed that many students often
browsed through and tidied up their photo albums on their smartphones that contained photos taken across locations
and time. That prompted some of them to create new artifacts arisen from those “older” photos, or even picking and
mixing several photos to create more artifacts—Figure 2a is a similar case, except that the first photo was taken with
another camera. In these cases, the students had transformed their smartphones from a productive tool to a cognitive
tool. We consider this a potentially new characteristic of seamless learning, on top of the ten major
characteristics/dimensions of seamless learning that Wong and Looi (2011) have expounded—the choices and the
seamless synthesis of suitable learning resources that a learner picked up (and perhaps all stored in her personal
mobile device as a “learning hub” (Wong, 2012)) along her on-going learning journey to mediate the latest learning
task.
The implications on authentic, productive language learning
Building on our findings in the previous DBR cycle of study, we further investigated and reflected upon the
characteristics of the three types of cognitive processes in artifact creations, which we summarize in Table 6.
Table 6. Comparison between three types of cognitive processes in artifact creations
Type-1 Type-2 Type-3
Assignment-like artifact creation Immediate, opportunistic, Spontaneous photo taking; delayed idiom-
process with relatively prescribed spontaneous idiom-to-context to-context association
artifact contexts to identify association
Good for form-meaning
Good for context-meaning Good for context-meaning connection in
connection in vocabulary connection (i.e., use of
vocabulary learning and extension of the
learning
vocabulary) in vocabulary
learning
artifact context
Mostly taking place in the school Mostly taking place at
Mostly taking place at home or at “other
or at home
“other locations”
locations”
We consider the classification and statistical analysis of the students’ artifacts in the three types as a potentially
effective technique in evaluating the students’ learning outcomes in the “Move, Idioms!” intervention. Based on our
analysis, the application of the Type-2 creation process (and to a lesser extent, the Type-3 process), requires students
to genuinely internalize the vocabulary that they have learned—so that they can immediately react to their daily
encounters and retrieve the right vocabulary to describe the situations. Therefore, the amount of (correct) Type-2
artifacts created by the students may serve as an indicator of students’ deep learning.
While we favor Type-2 artifacts, we do not discriminate two other types of artifacts. The creation of Type-1 artifacts
may serve as a strategy for the students’ deep learning of individual idioms in order to achieve internalization. Our
concern is on how to elevate those students who stick to creating Type-1 artifacts most of the time (e.g., 15 out of 34
students in our study created more Type-1 artifacts than the sum of Type-2 and Type-3 artifacts) to create more
Type-2 and Type-3 artifacts for a more balanced vocabulary development.
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