This article is an interview with Dr Paul Seedhouse, lead
researcher of the European Project VEO. The project team are working with an
app created by a Newcastle University spin-off company (VEO Ltd), which can be
used by various professions including teaching, business and medicine, for
training and research purposes. It enables users to video sessions (classes,
for example) and set up the app to tag recordings according to the user’s
requirements. In the interview, Dr Seedhouse explains that the app is likely to
be useful for education researchers, or for teachers who wish to reflect on
their own lessons, perhaps considering the level of motivation of their
students during lessons, considering types of questions asked, teacher talking
time, among other possibilities. Dr Seedhouse points out that the tagging that
the app performs is not Conversation Analysis per se but once you have the data
from the app, you can then transcribe the data to carry out whatever type of
analysis you need.
At the time of the interview, the project was working on
developing tags for specific uses; they have tags for language teaching
already, but they want to expand. They hope the app will be useful for
researchers of language use in the real world too.
This app provides one possible solution to how to observe
classrooms (for example) in the most unobtrusive way possible; most people are
used to seeing smartphones and tablets and are less likely to modify their
behaviour than they might with video cameras in the classroom. Furthermore,
video recordings (as opposed to audio recordings) mean that analysis can also
consider gestures and other physical aspects of spoken communication. Together
with the tagging system, whereby the user can easily identify points of
interest in the recording, this app could be groundbreaking for anyone
interested in educational technology.
Dr Seedhouse’s research focuses on the use of Conversation
analysis (CA) in language classrooms and you can read more about his earlier
work here:
He also wrote an article in 2010 (here) that all of us should read
carefully as it considers how different research methodologies can come to very
different conclusions:
In my context of online language learning and teaching, I will be following the project’s work (they post regularly in Twitter and Facebook and their website - https://veoeuropa.com/ - has up-to-date news too); we moved from audio to video several years ago and the tagging system looks
to be a valuable instrument for research purposes as well as for teacher training.
Jackie Robbins
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