Ellice writes:
> What we found is that instead of regressing, they
>were redefining the problem--often in terms that their "less able"
>partner preferred.... We concluded that part of the story
>is that in ill-defined problems without clear messages from an authority
>figure (except the message to "work together as a team"), students are
>likely to define and redefine the goals of the task in the process of
>working together.
and Judy writes:
>The point here is that differential expertise didn't get in the way of
>>collaboration where the students oriented in the same way to a TEXT -
>they deflected conflicts over role & status to decisions
>over wording, where strategies of social control
>determined who was responsible for the words they
>both agreed on. When a novice student oriented differently
>toward the text (had a different notion of what would
>count as text) the interaction was anything but collaborative.
Is it reasonable to read these (and other related) findings as indicating that:
1) "the task" is dynamic and probably multiple (i.e., that
intersubjectivity and task orientation/coordination are partial)
2) that, in joint task-oriented activity, definitions of the task and its
ends and processes are co-constructed in negotations that are
interpersonally as well as institutionally driven; and
3) that in such negotiations expertise (particularly expertise defined
externally) is only one of many factors that may shape the evolution of
mutual alignments (others factors being interpersonal liking, social
capital in multiple and overlapping reference groups, differential
motivation, the affordances of relevant artifacts, emergent elements of the
interaction, and so on)?
Paul Prior
pprior who-is-at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign