Justin Olmanson | University of Nebraska Lincoln (original) (raw)

Papers by Justin Olmanson

International Conference on Education, Research, and Innovation, 2024

In this study we investigate the perceptions and experiences of undergraduate speech language pat... more In this study we investigate the perceptions and experiences of undergraduate speech language pathology (SLP) students in using generative AI to support learning outcomes. We employ ethnographic methods to collect and analyze data for the purpose of 1) better understanding the roles generative AI played in the learning experiences of 10 SLP students in a course on technology use in clinical and educational settings; and 2) gaining insight as to how we might redesign Alex-TA, a custom-designed generative AI-enabled chatbot based on GPT-4, to better serve future cohorts of SLP students. Data includes AI-related course assignments, semi-structured interviews, and a think-aloud protocol with Alex-TA for each undergraduate SLP participant. Our findings suggest a range of attitudes and dispositions concerning the potential benefits and limitations of adapting generative AI innovations for SLP education. Participants demonstrated cautious receptiveness towards using generative AI to support their learning. Participants were more inclined to use Alex-TA for questions specifically related to the course rather than general inquiries about SLP. Additionally, their use was especially frequent when they felt the instructor was not available. This study has implications for educators in SLP, audiology, and communication sciences and disorders programs for supporting the development and integration of effective approaches to generative AI use and chatbot interface design that support student learning.

Conference on Education, Research, and Innovation Proceedings, 2024

Although an estimated 43% of the world's population interacts and can construct their understandi... more Although an estimated 43% of the world's population interacts and can construct their understanding via two or more languages, learning and schooling often happen exclusively in one language at a timeoften in their second or third language. This renders the task of learning complex concepts more difficult because students and teachers are not utilizing their full linguistic repertoires during the learning process. Thus, these linguistic restrictions bring about educational inefficiencies across the curriculum, from the humanities to computer science. In this design study, we focus on the potential of emerging technologies to support learning via the use of multiple languages within the same educational episode. This work outlines a design process and pedagogical rationale teachers, students, designers, and researchers can use to explore how generative AI can be used in a culturally relevant, personalized, and multimodal way. This research responds to a design opportunity within a technological moment wherein robust real-time multimodal, multi-agent, multilingual systems for student learning and teacher professional development are becoming increasingly feasible. We use learning computational thinking and literacies as a curricular focus to explore what learning computational problem solving could look like in the Mid 2020s and beyond for hundreds of millions of multilingual students.

Educational Technology Research & Development , Mar 12, 2021

This study investigates the effect of sequenced, time-delayed, multimodal Chinese language and co... more This study investigates the effect of sequenced, time-delayed, multimodal Chinese language and communicative literacy supports on the ability of learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language [CFL] to recognize characters and acquire literacy via writing in Chinese. A multimodal web application was designed and developed as a writing platform and supplementary teaching tool-leveraging second language [L2] spoken Chinese understanding and pinyin spelling knowledge to overcome the well documented difficulties faced by CFL students when learning and communicating via Chinese characters. We observed and recorded a communicative writing task carried out on the platform by 14 CFL students and interviewed them upon task completion-also interviewing their instructors. Our findings suggest that designing from a perspective that is pedagogically unique for CFL classrooms afforded new types of interactions and literacy development patterns. Specifically, timed, sequenced, multimodal scaffolds anchored to students' L2 spoken Chinese understanding and pinyin knowledge supported Chinese character recognition, production, and acquisition within communication and expression-centered tasks.

Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication - SIGDOC '07, 2007

This paper describes the design of Distributed Biography, an online tool for the co-construction ... more This paper describes the design of Distributed Biography, an online tool for the co-construction of individual, event, location or experience-based narrative. As the application is currently in the later stages of alpha development, the focus herein centers on our original designs, the process of understanding the collaborative rhythms of the group, and outlining the development trajectory.

Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology, 2018

Technology has been a staple in the language classroom for more than fifty years. From audio cass... more Technology has been a staple in the language classroom for more than fifty years. From audio cassettes, to video tapes, to multimedia CD-ROMs, to static and interactive web technologies, language teachers have taken the time to learn these tools and integrate them into the classroom experience. Each new technology, each new app, creates an opportunity to alter the experience of teaching and learning—often supporting increased authentic interactions with the Chinese language. This potential however can go unrealized when the ways the technologies are used align with more traditional grammar and vocabulary-focused teaching methodologies and promote efficiency over communication. In this article we explore the way traditional methodologies (i.e. Structural/Cognitive approaches) influence the implementation of web technologies. We unpack the complex relationship between language teaching Methodologies/Approaches, Methods, and Techniques. We examine several popular Chinese as a foreign language [CFL] web technologies, along with descriptions of their use, as a way to consider the influence of teachers’ educational values on technology integration decisions. We highlight the way design decisions made during the technology design and development process can constrain fit across methodologies. Next, as a way to outline what is possible when new technologies are informed by recent pedagogical developments, we briefly describe DaZiBao—a multimodal web application for learning characters via writing. Finally, we unpack findings and challenges from a pilot study of DaZiBao’s integration in a somewhat traditional classroom setting and offer suggestions for teachers, researchers, and technology designers.

SITE, 2018

Research into practices of making within formalized education has primarily focused on K12 settin... more Research into practices of making within formalized education has primarily focused on K12 settings, inservice teachers in professional development, and pre-service teachers facilitating a maker experience for K12 students. Less is known about the professionalizing impact making and human centered design can have on pre-service teachers, especially in relation to how or if the experience deepens their understanding of content, pedagogy and human centered design. This study traces a group of pre-service social science teachers’ development of a meme generator to support learning history. By studying their process from inception to conclusion, we found students were less inclined to engage in deep thinking about their content and the teaching of that content in favor of a fun-focused approach to their prototype which they asserted both connected with history lovers and solved the problem of “boring content.” We then theorize that students’ limited amount of pedagogical knowledge, limited exposure to human centered design, and a lack of course scaffolds contributed to an echo-chamber which limited students’ ability to cultivate the empathy inherent in prototyping and making. Finally we outline the instructional implications for using human centered design with pre-service teachers and describe the course maker project redesigns this study prompted.

Emerging Learning Design Journal, 2017

For learners unfamiliar with character-based or logosyllabic writing systems, the process of deve... more For learners unfamiliar with character-based or logosyllabic writing systems, the process of developing literacy in written Chinese poses significantly more obstacles than learning to read and write in a second language like Portuguese or Cherokee. In this article we describe the linguistic nature of Chinese characters; we outline traditional and new media approaches to Chinese character acquisition; we unpack how multimodal technologies combined with computational linguistics might be used to provide new types of support for Chinese character learning; and we offer a design that incorporates several of these concepts into a digital writing support tool that could work as a scaffold to enable Chinese language students to leverage their Chinese listening and speaking skills as well as their visual literacies in support of producing and learning Chinese characters.

Emerging Learning Design Journal, 2017

While making is typically tethered to narratives of entrepreneurship and business, it can provide... more While making is typically tethered to narratives of entrepreneurship and business, it can provide a gateway to meaningful interaction and deepened understanding of both content and pedagogy. In this article we provide descriptions of two courses—one each at the pre-service and in-service levels—that engage teachers in making and design practices that we hypothesized would inform their pedagogical and curricular thinking. With a focus on the design of new tools to support teaching and learning through the use of human-centered design practices and digital fabrication technologies, these courses have teachers exploring at the intersection of content, pedagogy, and making. Specifically, they inquire about theories of how people learn in interaction with physical tools and how these tools shape and guide content-specific thinking and learning. Several of their final projects are presented along with pedagogical and curricular inferences we made about them that suggest the promise of a making-oriented experience within teacher preparation and professional development.

African American Children in Early Childhood Education, 2017

For more than a century, state and federal governments and organizations have used different meas... more For more than a century, state and federal governments and organizations have used different measures to determine if students and groups of students have achieved in a particular subject or grade level. While the construct of achievement is applied irrespective of student differences, this equal application turns out to be anything but equitable. In this chapter, we work to understand the way achievement plays out for Black students by deconstructing how the word achievement works. In doing so, we track the history of education, testing, and curriculum as it has been applied to Black youth and youth of color.

The Nebraska Educator, 2016

Chinese character Learning has been identified as one of the most challenging issues for English-... more Chinese character Learning has been identified as one of the most challenging issues for English-speaking learners of Chinese due to the distinctions between the Chinese writing system and alphabetic languages in terms of orthography, phonology and semantics. In order to support Western students in overcoming the challenges associated with Chinese character learning a contextualized, socio-cultural approach to character learning was designed. Aimed at novice learners of Chinese, this design draws on social constructivism and Universal Design for Learning--contextualizing the learning experience and affording students to work on acquiring characters via several distinct avenues. The project-based inquiry design supports the exploration of Chinese character learning through six research-based learning tools and strategies. These tools include: educational technologies designed specifically for learning Chinese characters, pinyin & typing, making connections between different levels of linguistic components, stroke animation, handwriting, radical positioning, and character gamification. This learning experience design integrates multiple technology tools, awareness of culture, hands-on activities, and interactive multimodal web technologies that draw on constructivist theories and approaches to language acquisition.

World Academy of Science, 2015

In educational technology, the idea of innovation is usually tethered to contemporary technologic... more In educational technology, the idea of innovation is usually tethered to contemporary technological inventions and emerging technologies. Yet, using long-known technologies in ways that are pedagogically or experientially new can reposition them as emerging educational technologies. In this study we explore how a subtle pivot in pedagogical thinking led to an innovative education technology. We describe the design and implementation of an online writing tool that scaffolds students in the evaluation of their own informational texts. We think about how pathways to innovation can emerge from pivots, namely a leveraging of longstanding practices in novel ways has the potential to cultivate new opportunities for learning. We first unpack Infowriter in terms of its design, then we describe some results of a study in which we implemented an intervention which included our designed application.

World Academy of Science, 2015

While emerging technologies continue to emerge, research into their use in learning contexts ofte... more While emerging technologies continue to emerge, research into their use in learning contexts often focuses on a subset of educational practices and ways of using technologies. In this study we begin to explore the extent to which educational designs are influenced by larger societal and education-related factors not usually explicitly considered when designing or identifying technologysupported education experiences for research study. We examine patterns within and between factors via a content analysis across ten years and 19 different journals of published peer-reviewed research on technology-supported writing. Our findings have implications for how researchers, designers, and educators approach technologysupported educational design within and beyond the field of writing and literacy.

CALL Conference, 2012

For more than forty years, researchers investigating ESL and EFL programs across North America (S... more For more than forty years, researchers investigating ESL and EFL programs across North America (Sartain, 1960) and around the world (Elley & Mangubhai, 1983), have reported on the positive impact of open-ended activities such as free reading on literacy and language development. Despite this, concerns about the fragility of contextual guessing in an L2 (Hulstijn, 1991; Ma & Kelly, 2006; Wesche & Paribakht, 2000) have limited the use of open-ended reading and writing activities. Consequently, instructed approaches to SLA often rely primarily on explicit vocabulary learning tasks. In this presentation and paper we describe the tensions between explicit and implicit learning in an L2 and demonstrate how a CALL application we created might mitigate some of the obstacles L2 language learners face in open-ended, learner-directed, implicit SLA. FunWritr (Olmanson, Farchy, & Day, 2010) is a literacy playground and language learning mashup application designed to reduce the amount of contextual guessing typically required of learners in open-ended implicit L2 learning settings. The application does this by using the learner's L2 written output as a catalyst for language exploration, opening up a gateway to less familiar language anchored in the initial learner output and conveyed through multimodality (Jewitt, 2006) and multiplicity.

Middle Grades Review, 2016

This article offers a critique of the way middle schoolers are often positioned as generalizable ... more This article offers a critique of the way middle schoolers are often positioned as generalizable objects that can be acted upon to produce measurable increases in motivation and learning. The critique invites a reconsideration and cultural analysis of some of the dominant discourses and perceptions of technology, young adolescence, and the study of motivation. The use of New Ethnographic Writing—a method that performs a cultural critique via extended scenes—connects to the roles and status of motivation, technology, and educational research methods deployed within public schools. Coupled with weak theory, this approach offers a way to understand young adolescents as navigating and wayfaring within complex everyday ecologies that escape notions of developmental level, test scores, motivational indices, and GPA calculations. New Ethnographic Writing and weak theory invite a productive re-orientation to the interactions that take place every day in schools. This invitation comes via a methodological sideways move that draws on non-representational theory and literary non-fiction to form a mode of address that makes relational and momentarily cartographic types of knowing and understanding possible.

Discussion Notes #4, 2006

In Richard Meier’s lecture and companion article titled, Modality and Structure in Signed and Spo... more In Richard Meier’s lecture and companion article titled, Modality and Structure in Signed and Spoken Languages, he states that modality (and thereby dimensionality), appears to play a role in language. To put it in his words,

“Exploration of modality differences [between spoken and signed languages] holds out the hope that we may achieve a kind of explanation that is rare in linguistics. Specifically, we may be able to explore hypotheses that this or that property of signed or spoken language is attributable to the particular constraints that affect that modality.”
“…[Pinker and Bloom] consider the medium for speech to be fundamentally one-dimensional; speech plays out over time. But sign languages are conveyed through a multidimensional medium: the articulatory and perceptual characteristics of the visual-gestural modality give signed languages access to four dimensions of space and time.”

While overwhelming empirical evidence demonstrating the impact modality may or may not play in language does not yet exist; Meier’s hypotheses make for fertile ground in terms of suggesting remedies for a traditional target of difficulty. This target of difficulty, literacy learning by deaf populations, was brought to light by a comment made by Meier during the question and answer portion of his presentation (November 9, 2005). He stated that deaf High School graduates, on average, read at only a third grade level.

Discussion Notes #2, 2006

In Jacqueline D. Woolley’s article titled, Thinking about Fantasy: Are Children Fundamentally Dif... more In Jacqueline D. Woolley’s article titled, Thinking about Fantasy: Are Children Fundamentally Different Thinkers and Believers from Adults, it is stated that there are areas of both convergence and divergence in the way adults and children think about things that are real and those that are in the realm of fantasy. To put it in her words,

“Summarizing the literature reviewed in this section should cause us to reject the hypothesis that children and adults differ qualitatively both in terms of fantastical thinking and in terms of thinking about fantasy. Yet we have also rejected the claim that children and adults do not differ at all.”

While this view is supported by a great deal of empirical evidence and appears to be a plausible point of departure for her subsequent positing of possible explanatory theories, it shows that despite a great deal of research not much has been learned. Such a circumstance may stem from its very adherence to the credence-giving measures espoused and employed by the positivist paradigm under which the research seems to have taken place.

Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2016

Though media differ in terms of the types of discourse they support, the way they can be designed... more Though media differ in terms of the types of discourse they support, the way they can be designed, and the means of their production and distribution, it is the extent to which they bridge distance and support multidirectional interaction that largely determines if they are counted as new media or not (Flew and Smith 2011). Media that primarily transmit in one direction (e.g., academic journals, broadcast radio and television, printed novels and newspapers) constrain access to the means of designing, producing, and distributing expression and generally exist outside the umbrella of new media. Digital platforms that simultaneously facilitate the democratized design, production, and distribution of interactive expression over networks are counted as new media (Beavis 2013). This, however, is not to suggest a rigid binary. While, in some ways, new media have supplanted other forms of media, their emergence has also led to multiple levels of convergence and overlap among the range of media platforms wherein features, users, and content are shared within and across groups, modes, and platforms (Jenkins 2006).

Given the proliferation of technological tools, environments, and supports within the field of ed... more Given the proliferation of technological tools, environments, and supports within the field of education, and the predominant investigative orientation of educational technology researchers being intervention-focused, a minority of scholars have called for other ways of understanding the nuance and contours of educational interactions and technology. This study explores the possibilities for such an orientation at the public elementary school level by maintaining a non-traditional theoretical and wide contextual focus. Toward this end, this study performs and constitutes an experimental mode of address meant to further considerations of educational technology use and educational technology discourse in and around school libraries, second, third, fourth, and fifth grade bilingual, ESL, and regular classrooms. This work is a Deleuzian experiment in New Ethnographic Writing and New Ethnography that also explores aspects of critical design ethnography and the affinity- based design of an educational mashup. Ethnographic attentions were applied over four-year period concentrating on language arts, ESL, and literacy activities. Through performative writing, loose networks of individuals, artifacts, places, processes, movement, and machines are explored.

Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 2016

Once writers complete a first draft, they are often encouraged to evaluate their writing and prio... more Once writers complete a first draft, they are often encouraged to evaluate their writing and prioritize what to revise. Yet, this process can be both daunting and difficult. This study looks at how students used a semantic concept mapping tool to re-present the content and organization of their initial draft of an informational text. We examine the processes of students at two different schools as they remediated their own texts and how those processes impacted the development of their rhetorical, conceptual, and communicative capacities. Our analysis suggests that students creating visualizations of their completed first drafts scaffolded self-evaluation. The mapping tool aided visualization by converting compositions into discrete persistent visual data elements that represented concepts and connections. This often led to students’ meta-awareness of what was missing or misaligned in their draft. Our findings have implications for how students approach, educators perceive, and designers support the drafting and revision process.

ED-MEDIA 2010-World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications, 2010

This paper recounts and unpacks the two and one half year history of the continuing efforts of a ... more This paper recounts and unpacks the two and one half year history of the continuing efforts of a student-initiated, student-led research group at a major university in the Middle United States. Begun with a post to a listserv, the Language Learning & Technology, Research and Design Group's membership expanded from 3 to 10 and has provided its participants with a range of experiences centered on a particular research project. Members include incoming master's students to with no research experience, prospective Educational Technology students, PhD candidates, and computer science interns. Together we have brainstormed ideas, designed and navigated a mutually interesting way forward, sketched out prototype designs, and refined our vision. Through this paper we describe our experience in a way that might provide insight to fellow Educational Technology students interested in starting, growing, and maintaining a student-led, affinity-based research and design group. We explain w...

International Conference on Education, Research, and Innovation, 2024

Conference on Education, Research, and Innovation Proceedings, 2024

Educational Technology Research & Development , Mar 12, 2021

Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication - SIGDOC '07, 2007

Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology, 2018

SITE, 2018

Emerging Learning Design Journal, 2017

African American Children in Early Childhood Education, 2017

The Nebraska Educator, 2016

World Academy of Science, 2015

CALL Conference, 2012

Middle Grades Review, 2016

Discussion Notes #4, 2006

Discussion Notes #2, 2006

Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2016

Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 2016

ED-MEDIA 2010-World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications, 2010

E-Learning and Digital Media

In this article, the authors trace teachers’ experiences while participating in an educational te... more In this article, the authors trace teachers’ experiences while participating in an educational technology development and research project focused on the creation and use of an online writing and peer review environment. They follow teachers from their initial expectations of the program, to their response to professional development training sessions, planning sessions, student account setup, and to their initial attempts at utilizing the digital learning environment in the classroom. In so doing, the authors suggest that the path toward and away from successful classroom implementation of emerging learning technologies is a multiple, shifting, and interrelational one, influenced by constellations of factors including affect, administrator support, student buy-in, research and development team knowledge and availability, district priorities, and the amount of upheaval in the personal lives of teachers.