Taming is an experiment and a written assignment about the development of ProjectMorpheo, which was my degree project at Stockholm University of the Arts. ProjectMorpheo is a participatory experience designed to explore the fragile connections between the content of our dreams and the physical materials that surround us. To give a chance for contemplation the project uses meditation and an experimental form of a contemporary puppetry technique: material animation. Taming Amorphalia is a fictional documentation of the intrapersonal happenings, the experiments and experiences that influenced me during the development of ProjectMorpheo. The aim is to introduce the intuitive process behind the project through the form of a text based RPG.

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Many learners find the transition from block-based programming to text-based programming difficult. Consequently, research has investigated how block-based languages support learners when making the transition to text-based programming. It categorized the way in which block-based languages support the transition into one-way transition, dual-modality and hybrid environments. This research investigates how one-way transition environments compare to dual-modality environments with regards to learning a text-based language, and how the two modalities differ with regards to the motivational factors satisfaction, enjoyment and easiness. The results show that dual-modality environments could be a better alternative than one-way transition environment when learners make the transition from block-based to text-based programming. The results also show that solving a problem in dual-modality environments could be easier than solving them in one-way transition environments, which could potentially mean that learners experience more motivation when making the transition in a dual-modality environment. This study also investigated if there is an alternative to one-way transition, dual-modality and hybrid environments when helping learners transition from block-based to text-based programming, and what a learning activity in this alternative solution could look like. It found that Blockly Games is an alternative, and describes a learning activity built in Blockly Games. Future research should aim at gaining a deeper understanding of the differences between one-way transition, dual-modality and hybrid environments, and investigate if the approach taken by Blockly Games is a better alternative. / Många elever tycker att övergången från blockbaserad programmering till textbaserad programmering är svår. Följaktligen har forskning undersökt hur blockbaserade språk stödjer elever när de gör övergången till textbaserad programmering. En studie fann att blockbaserade språk stöder denna övergång med hjälp av one-way transition miljöer, dual-modality miljöer och hybrid miljöer. Denna forskning undersöker hur one-way transition miljöer jämför sig med dual-modality miljöer när det kommer till att lära sig ett textbaserat språk, och hur de två modaliteterna skiljer sig åt med avseende på motivationsfaktorerna tillfredsställelse, njutning och lätthet. Resultaten visar att dual-modality miljöer kan vara ett bättre alternativ än one-way transition miljöer när eleverna gör övergången från blockbaserad till textbaserad programmering. Resultaten visar också att det kan vara lättare att lösa ett problem i dual-modality miljöer än att lösa dem i one-way transition miljöer, vilket potentiellt kan innebära att eleverna upplever mer motivation när de gör övergången i en dual-modality miljö. Denna studie undersökte också om det finns ett alternativ till one-way transition miljöer, dual-modality miljöer och hybrid miljöer när elever ska övergå från blockbaserad till textbaserad programmering, och hur en inlärningsaktivitet i denna alternativa lösning skulle kunna se ut. Den fann att Blockly Games är ett alternativ och beskriver en inlärningsaktivitet byggd i Blockly Games. Framtida forskning borde försöka få en djupare förståelse för skillnaderna mellan one-way transition miljöer, dual-modality miljöer och hybrid miljöer, och undersöka om det tillvägagångssätt som Blockly Games använder är ett bättre alternativ.

Abstract  The present work is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of pragmatic strategies for delivering critique, and types of politeness, used by undergraduate L2 students of English at different stages of peer-review discussion. The material examined consists of four corpora of authentic conversations between students, the main purpose of which was to give feedback on each other’s contributions during an English A-level course, at Mid-Sweden University. The conversations explored were carried out electronically, and represent four different online environments, or modes of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The material from the two asynchronous modes of CMC is comprised of L2 students’ written discussion board messages and spoken posts recorded using online software. The two synchronous environments under investigation are text-based and voice-based chat. Taking Brown and Levinson’s (1987) framework of politeness as a point of departure, the present study uses a combination of corpus and conversation analytical methods. The basic unit of analysis has been defined as the shortest message of peer-review critique that constitutes a thematic unit: these have been examined in terms of their content and politeness features associated with them, and analyzed in terms of the pragmatic strategy and type of politeness adopted. The types of pragmatic strategies or message organization patterns at different stages, i.e. initial versus subsequent feedback, of the peer-review discussion have also been analyzed. The results of the study show that the pragmatic strategies aimed at praise and agreement prevail in the corpus data produced by predominantly native speakers of Swedish. Even though the pragmatic strategies used for disagreement and negative evaluation are rich in propositional content, their occurrences and distribution vary across the four modes of CMC examined. These results seem to have wider implications in the context of online L2 learning activities, providing insights about the language of peer-review critique in a Swedish academic setting.   Keywords: computer-mediated communication (CMC), Conversation Analysis (CA), conversation management, discussion boards, feedback category, mode of CMC, peer-review discussion, politeness theory, pragmatic strategy, speech act of critique, text-based chat, type of politeness, voice-based chat, VoiceThread

Masters of Science / Communication tools such as text-based instant messaging, voice and video relay services, real-time video chat and mobile SMS and MMS have successfully been used among Deaf people. Several years of field research with a local Deaf community revealed that disadvantaged South African Deaf people preferred to communicate with both Deaf and hearing peers in South African Sign Language as opposed to text.Synchronous video chat and video relay services provided such opportunities. Both types of services are commonly available in developed regions, but not in developing countries like South Africa. This thesis reports on a workaround approach to design and develop an asynchronous video communication tool that adapted synchronous video codecs to store-and-forward video delivery. This novel asynchronous video tool provided high quality South African Sign Language video chat at the expense of some additional latency. Synchronous video codec adaptation consisted of comparing codecs,and choosing one to optimise in order to minimise latency and preserve video quality.Traditional quality of service metrics only addressed real-time video quality and related services. There was no such standard for asynchronous video communication. Therefore, we also enhanced traditional objective video quality metrics with subjective assessment metrics conducted with the local Deaf community.

This essay aims to investigate theoretically how two currently used coursebooks, What’s Up 9 and Solid Gold 1, in a local area of Southern Sweden, present (introduces and covers) grammar. The overall aim is to investigate how grammar is presented, using the present simple and the present continuous as examples. The findings are also mapped to teaching approaches, as well as SLA (Second Language Acquisition) research, to see what approaches are favoured for teaching grammar in the first decades of the 21st century. In order to investigate the course- books, a qualitative content analysis and conceptual analysis was chosen with the presentation of grammar mapped into different categories, by using concepts for teaching and approaches used in SLA. The results show that the two proposed coursebooks favoured a FoFs (Focus on Forms) approach for presenting grammar. Furthermore, the results show that grammar is pre- sented explicitly and, if the teachers use the structures proposed in the coursebook rigidly, they automatically follow a deductive teaching procedure. When using a FoFs, explicit instructions and taking a deductive teaching approach, it may be regarded as the coursebooks suggest a grammar-translation approach as well. However, when observing other exercises connected to the reading texts in the coursebooks, it was detected that both coursebooks favoured a text- based approach for teaching, where the learners are supposed to learn the structure of different texts. In doing so, the grammatical structures are learned subconsciously and implicitly, which indicates that grammar is, in general, taught implicitly in the coursebooks, but presented (intro- duced and covered) explicitly.

Blockbaserade utvecklingsmiljöer blir allt vanligare för att lära ut grunderna i programmering. Metoden har visat sig ha flera fördelar jämfört med textbaserad programmering, som historiskt sett varit den ledande metoden för undervisning. Då textbaserad programmering dominerar industrin i stort behöver övergången från block- till textbaserad programmering ske förr eller senare, för de som tänkt fortsätta inom området. Denna övergång har visat sig innebära flera utmaningar. Som en del av detta arbete togs en textbaserad utvecklingsmiljö fram, med inspiration från styrkorna i blockbaserade miljöer. Syftet med detta var att möjliggöra en jämförelse i läsbarhet av kod mellan de olika miljöerna, samt undersöka utfallet av att hämta inspiration från blockbaserade miljöer vid skapandet av en textbaserad miljö. Den nyutvecklade miljön är ett textbaserat alternativ till en befintlig blockbaserad utvecklingsmiljö, som används för att programmera en digital lekplats. Miljön utvärderas genom två tester. Det ena testet var ett läsbarhetstest som utfördes på en klass i årskurs sju, vars elever hade minimal tidigare erfarenhet av programmering. Det andra testet var ett användartest i utvecklingsmiljön, där åtta personer med tidigare erfarenhet av programmering fick utvärdera den textbaserade utvecklingsmiljön sett till hur nybörjarvänlig den var och hur väl designprinciperna var implementerade. Utvärderingarna visade att den utvecklade miljön ansågs vara nybörjarvänlig. Testerna visade även att miljön var mer läsbar än sin blockbaserade motsvarighet och överlag väl anpassad för nybörjare. Dessutom ansågs designprincipernas implementationer underlätta utveckling i miljön. / Block-based development environments are becoming increasingly common for teaching the basics of programming. This method has shown several advantages compared to text-based programming, which has historically been more popular for educational purposes. Since text-based programming dominates the industry, the transition from block-based to text-based programming is inevitable for those who plan to continue within the field. This transition implies several challenges. As a part of this study a text-based development environment was developed, taking inspiration from the advantages of block-based development environments. The purpose of this was to enable a comparison of code readability between the two development environments and to study the outcome of taking inspiration from the strengths of block-based programming environments. The developed text-based environment is an alternative to an existing block-based environment, used to program a digital playground. The environment was evaluated through two tests. One test was a readability test with a class of students in seventh grade, who had minimal previous programming experience. The other test was a user test, where eight people with previous experience of programming evaluated the text-based development environment in regard to how beginner-friendly it was and how well the design principles were implemented. The evaluations showed that the developed text-based environment was considered beginner-friendly. The tests also showed that the environment was more readable than its block-based counterpart and overall well-suited for beginners. In addition, the implementation of design principles was considered to facilitate development in the environment.

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Writing coherent essays is evidence of a university student's discourse competence and is important in terms of academic success. An analytical taxonomy of coherence breaks {both topic-related and cohesion-related), based on Wikborg (1985; 1990), was used to determine the frequency of coherence breaks in essays written by first-year English Second Language (ESL) students. A subset of these essays was selected for assessment of their holistic coherence (HCR) by raters. The major finding of the statistical tests is that there is a significant relationship between the frequency of coherence breaks, particularly topic-related coherence breaks, and holistic coherence. Furthermore, the relationship between the coherence of essays and marks awarded them was established. Tutor intervention was also found to have had a positive impact when draft and final versions were compared: in general, there was a decrease in the frequency of coherence breaks, and a greater perception of coherence in the final versions. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Linguistics)

Writing coherent essays is evidence of a university student's discourse competence and is important in terms of academic success. An analytical taxonomy of coherence breaks {both topic-related and cohesion-related), based on Wikborg (1985; 1990), was used to determine the frequency of coherence breaks in essays written by first-year English Second Language (ESL) students. A subset of these essays was selected for assessment of their holistic coherence (HCR) by raters. The major finding of the statistical tests is that there is a significant relationship between the frequency of coherence breaks, particularly topic-related coherence breaks, and holistic coherence. Furthermore, the relationship between the coherence of essays and marks awarded them was established. Tutor intervention was also found to have had a positive impact when draft and final versions were compared: in general, there was a decrease in the frequency of coherence breaks, and a greater perception of coherence in the final versions. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Linguistics)