>From: Phil Agre <pagre@alpha.oac.ucla.edu>
[A lot of useful work is happening in the community of education people
who descend intellectually from a Russian psychologist named Vygotsky.
According to Vygotskian psychology, thinking has its origins in social
interactions: you interact with other people, you internalize those
patterns of interaction, and that's what thinking is. This theory has
innumerable consequences, all of which are illuminating and productive.
For example, Vygotsky's theory directs our attention to all of the
informal apprenticeship that happens in everyday life, whether between
adults and children or simply between people who have different degrees
of expertise in a particular area. In situations like that, the people
often spontaneously and dynamically adjust the division of labor so that
the learner is operating right at the outer limits of his or her current
skill level. That's an ideal environment for learning, and many studies
have been conducted of its internal architecture.
Vygotsky's theory also directs our attention to the social organization
of the environments in which learning takes place: if you learn to think
by internalizing your interactions with others, and if your interactions
with others are shaped by institutions, it follows that your patterns
of thinking will be related in some important way to the institutional
structure of your society. The relationship need not be obvious, but it
is worth looking into.
The enclosed message contains lengthy excerpts from a new edited book that
applies these ideas to the study of learning environments, and especially
ones that involve computers. The whole way of thinking and writing will
seem like a foreign language to a lot of people, but I am hoping that my
brief summary here will provide some sense of the overall point. Although
I have heavily reformatted the text, it does contain an unusual number
of glitches and typos, most of which result from it having been converted
from one too many format to another. The manuscript was also modified in
small ways in proof. So if you want to quote a passage from this material,
you should refer to the printed book for the authoritative version. Also,
to fit this message into your mailbox, I have taken it upon myself to cut
out several long passages; each of the cuts is marked with [...]. These
cuts necessarily mangle the message to some degree. So, again, refer to
the printed book for the complete story.
Again I'm sorry for the heavy traffic on the list in the past week or so.
I'm still working my way through the backlog that I accumulated when I was
away in September. I'm almost there, though, and the traffic should start
to subside real soon.]
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Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 23:23:43 +0100
>From: J.F.Bliss@sussex.ac.uk (Joan Bliss)
Learning Sites:
Social and Technological Resources for Learning
Edited by Joan Bliss, Roger Saljo and Paul Light
Pergamon Press, 1999
ISBN -- 0080433502
Table of Contents
1. The Human-Technological Dialectic
Joan Bliss and Roger Saljo 1
PART 1: Learning and the Negotiation of Meaning
Introduction by Roger Saljo 13
2. Learning Mathematics in and outside School:
Two Views on Situated Learning
Guida de Abreu 17
3. Situated Selves: Learning to be a Learner
Chris Sinha 32
4. Negotiating Identities and Meanings in the Transmission of
Knowledge: Analysis of Interactions in the Context of a Knowledge
Exchange Network
Nathalie Muller and Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont 47
5. Real-world Knowledge and Mathematical Problem-solving in Upper
Primary School Children
Erik De Corte, Lieven Verschaffel, Sabien Lasure, Inge Borghart
and Hajime Yoshida 61
6. Quantifying Time as a Discursive Practice: Arithmetics, Calendars,
Fingers and Group Discussions as Structuring Resources
Jan Wyndhamn and Roger Saljo 80
PART 2: Learning and Reasoning in Context
Introduction by Paul Light 97
7. Situated Learning in Instructional Settings: From Euphoria to
Feasibility
Alexander Renkl, Hans Gruber and Heinz Mandl 101
8. Engaging with Organisational Memory
Antonio Rizzo, Patrizia Marti, Vito Veneziano and Sebastiano
Bagnara 110
9. The Relevance of Relevance in Children's Cognition
Agnes Blaye, Edith Ackermann and Paul Light 120
10. Empirical Abstraction and Imaginative Denial of Rules
Joan Bliss, Jon Ogborn, Orla Cronin, Will Reader and
H.A. Tsatsarelis 132
11. Enactive Representations in Learning: Pretence, Models and Machines
Edith K. Ackermann 144
12. Contextual Knowledge in the Development of Design Expertise
Anneli Etelapelto and Paul Light 155
PART 3: Learning with and by Machines
Introduction by Joan Bliss 165
13. Gender and IT: Contextualising Differences
Karen Littleton and Maria Bannert 171
14. Information Technology and the Culture of Student Learning
Charles Crook and Paul Light 183
15. Assisting Child-Computer Collaboration in the Zone of Proximal
Development (The Vygotskian Inspired System (VIS))
Rosemary Luckin 194
16. Learning and Discovering with Computational Aids
Vincent Corruble and Joan Bliss 210
17. Situated Cognition: A Challenge to Artificial Intelligence?
Dolores Canamero and Vincent Corruble 223
18. Situated Learning in Autonomous Agents
Bart de Boer and Dolores Canamero 236
19. Situated Learning at the Threshold of the New Millennium
Yrjo Engestrom 249
The Human-Technological Dialectic
Joan Bliss and Roger Saljo
Human learning, reasoning and thinking, and the different sites in
which these activities take place, are the focus of this book. While
the different authors do not share one single perspective on how to
approach and understand these issues, they have come to articulate
a framework which they both use and criticise constructively in
order to develop it. Importantly, human learning is seen not only
as individuals actively making sense of their world in solitary
activities, but it is seen also through the manner in which the social
and cultural world, its practices and its artefacts, codetermine the
way in which people approach learning in various settings, inside and
outside formal institutions. The social and technological contexts
in which individuals learn and work play a decisive role in the
development of the individual. To understand how people learn is to
simultaneously understand how they are able to adapt to (and sometimes
to resist) the practices of various social institutions, and to
appropriate and operate with the technological and intellectual tools
that are salient in these environments.
In Vygotskian terms (Cole, 1996; Vygotsky, 1986), artefacts mediate
the world for us in accordance with the traditions and knowledge
generated by previous generations. For example, the compass and the
clock as artefacts are interesting and useful to us precisely because
they mediate direction and time in a culturally meaningful and useful
manner. It is the co-ordination of a physical device (which is
not particularly interesting per se) with categories such as north
and south, hour and minute that creates an interesting and highly
significant artefact that is of considerable use to people. Although
material in their appearance, such artefacts are designed to give
information along the lines suggested by categories developed by
humans. Thus, in some sense reasoning and artefacts co-evolve
during human history. And the more sophisticated artefacts become,
the more our learning and reasoning will involve the mastery of such
resources.
But in order to be able to consider the link between humans and
technologies, it is obviously necessary to pay attention to the most
powerful system for mediating the world that humans have created:
language. Concepts and the manner in which these codify reality are
the link between human reasoning and artefacts. As we have already
hinted at, even technologies are impregnated with human signs, and
when we encoun-ter them it is precisely their sign-giving function in
which we are interested. Thus, discursive constructions are very much
a part of our practical activities in everyday life whether we are
talking or not.
1 Communication as Practical Action
[...]
In order to underline the similarity between physical artefacts
and conceptual constructions codified in language, Vygotsky (1986)
argued that both these elements of human practices should be thought
of as tools. Language is a tool used for practical purposes, and it
has furthermore been created by human beings to account for reality
in a manner that is congenial with a certain culture and its basic
assumptions. Concepts and linguistic expressions can, following
this mode of thinking, be thought of as psychological tools that
have emerged through the history of a society. They help us to do
things in a manner that is analogous to how physical tools can be
used for chopping trees, cultivating land or mending engines. The
psychological tools of language are used both for thinking and for
communicating.
But, and as we have already pointed out, there is no strict line of
demarcation between psychological tools (concepts) and physical tools
either. Concepts are embodied in physical artefacts, and they are
part of what makes such artefacts meaningful to people. When using
the computer, we are not relating to an object that we conceive of
in terms of electric circuits. Rather, we are writing texts using a
word processing programme that represents language in a manner that
is meaningful to us or we are making calculations by multiplying or
adding digits that represent the numerical system that we know from
other practices. Technological devices as such, and in their physical
appearance, are largely uninteresting to us and we generally do not
want to bother about such matters. As Ogborn (1996, p.3) points out:
"commercialised technology puts a lot of effort into making it not
necessary to understand the workings of its artefacts. Technologies
often make the science and the technique behind them invisible."
But the focus on what people do with words and technologies must not
be seen in terms of individual activities only. A third component
of our triadic unit of analysis of people using tools when acting in
social life is the collectively shared cultural practices that make
up society. Thus, we have to understand how modes of communication
and technologies are inserted into and help sustain collective human
action in enduring patterns. Put differently, when focusing on
learning and reasoning, we have to consider how human activities are
institutionalised.
2 Social Institutions as Contexts for Reasoning
Schooling is one of the most apparent examples of how societies create
stable social practices that are continuously produced and reproduced
over long periods of time. But we find enduring arrangements of
how to conduct social life in many sectors of society: in production,
bureaucracies, science and research, and health care, to mention just
a few examples.
These institutions are interesting from the point of view of learning
and reasoning, since knowledge is to a large extent developed and
maintained within such enduring social structures. Science and
research are obvious examples of this kind of institutionally produced
knowledge and skills. The ability to act competently within these
institutions requires familiarity with the traditions and knowledge
systems that are dominant. And learning in modern society is
largely a matter of mastering the knowledge and skills that have been
generated through such social institutions. In schools, for instance,
children's ability to appropriate different kinds of knowledge is
decisive for the success that they will experience whilst being a
student, and this, in turn, will have consequences later in life.
At first sight it might seem as if the relationship between knowledge
acquired in various settings is obvious. What we learn in school will
be readily translated to other settings. A key feature of traditional
learning theories has been the concept of transfer, and the assumption
that people will understand new problems and events in terms of the
relevant knowledge they already possess. But, as will be discussed
by several authors in this volume, transfer is by no means automatic
or simple. What we learn in one setting does not always translate
easily into other settings where the conditions and institutional
arrangements may be slightly different. Furthermore, there may often
be conflicting assumptions regarding what is the relevant knowledge
to transfer to a particular problem in a specific setting. Reasoning
is situated and knowing what to do is more than knowing a rule, an
algorithm or a principle. What is required is generally familiarity
with a certain set of social practices and a sense of what is
the expected mode of acting and reasoning (for empirical research
illustrating the situ-atedness of human reasoning, see, for instance,
Chaiklin & Lave, 1993; Resnick et al., 1997).
3 A Sociocultural Perspective on Learning and Reasoning
What has been said so far indicates our ambition to build a bridge
between people, their intellectual and practical actions, and
sociocultural reality. From such a perspective artefacts in the shape
of physical objects, discursive constructions, and social institutions
play an essential role. Our culture in its material and immaterial
appearance is to a large extent artificial in the sense that it
has been produced by human beings. White (1996, p. xiii) expresses
this by saying that "[a]rtefacts are the fundamental constituents
of culture". Consequently, the "... growth of the human mind, in
ontogeny and in human history, must be properly understood as a
co-evolution of human activities and artefacts. The words we speak,
the social institutions in which we participate, the man-made physical
objects we use, all serve as both tools and symbols". And they are
all essential to our daily actions.
This conception of thinking and reasoning as tool-dependent is
fundamental to a sociocultural understanding of the human mind
and human practices. Our intellect is social in the sense that it
relies on conceptual and material resources and tools that emanate
from our culture. As Cole (1996, p. 137) puts it, "... what we call
mind works through artefacts". This implies that "... it cannot
be unconditionally bounded by the head or the body but must be seen
as distributed in the artefacts which are woven together and which
weave together individual actions in concert with and as part of
the permeable, changing events of life". Thinking and reasoning are
better conceived of as distributed over individuals operating with
tools in social activities rather than as confined to the inside of
our head only (Lave, 1988). This notion of the distributed nature
of human thinking between people and across artefacts and social
institutions is essential to a socio-cultural perspective on the human
mind. Artefacts and technologies are some of the places where humans
store their knowledge and experiences, as we have already pointed out.
4 Past Technology and Social Practices
[...]
5 Technology and Social Practices: the Human Urge to Communicate and
its Technological Manifestations
[...]
6 Technologies as Tools for Reasoning and Social Action
The emphasis in this book on technologies should not be read in a
narrow manner as signalling a clear boundary between human beings
thinking and reasoning on the one hand, and a set of sophisticated,
but dead objects, on the other. In fact, our intention is exactly the
opposite. It is not the 'human thinking plus technology' conception
of learning and reasoning that is being presented. Nor do we claim
that learning becomes very much easier or more pleasant through
the use of technological tools, which seems to be the favourite
metaphor behind the products being offered on the market through
the edutainment industry. Rather, what is being considered is the
inclusive nature of the link between people and artefacts in various
social practices. When technologies change, so does the nature of
human thinking and learning and so do our practices. It is, to take
a rather trivial example, one thing to solve a multiplication problem
involving numbers with several decimals using nothing but what is
inside our heads. It is another thing to solve the problem when paper
and pencil are available. And it is yet a different matter to do it
with a mini-calculator as a tool to think with. What is impossible to
manage in the head, and without external resources, becomes manageable
with paper and pencil, and may very well be trivial to handle if there
is a calculator around.
Following this line of reasoning, physical artefacts at various levels
of complexity (watches, rulers, computers, maps, television sets and
so on) will be conceived of as "the manufactured objects that silently
impregnate the furniture of the world with human intelligence" (White,
1996, p. xiii). In this sense, human beings convert their ideas,
concepts and methods into artefacts, and they thus have "the power
to endow the material world with a new class of properties that,
though they owe their origin to us, acquire an enduring presence in
objective reality, coming to exist independently of human individuals"
(Bakhurst, 1991, p.l79-180).
This volume has three parts, and in the first two parts artefacts
are part and parcel of the contexts and social practices examined and
discussed. These chapters show that artefacts both ideal and material
(Cole, 1996, p.117) have always been part of our lives, have shaped
our lives, and have been shaped by lives. Some chapters will focus on
specific ones, like the use of the braca, the measuring and counting
system of Brazilian sugar-cane farmers in Chapter 3, the use of the
calendar, or the fingers in Swedish pupils' mathematics lessons in
Chapter 6. In other chapters they are just a normal part of the
context, like the teapot in the tea-making ritual in the 'topsy-turvy'
children's task in Chapter 10. In the last section, one of the
artefacts of our new technologies -- the computer -- is the major
focus.
While artefacts are an integral part of the whole volume, each section
has a different and more specific theme, which is developed and
illustrated through a number of pieces of research. The editor of
each section introduces and situates each of the chapters in relation
to the underlying theme.
In Part I the theme running through all the chapters relates to
how meaning is created and negotiated by people operating with
cultural tools, carrying out concrete activities. In other words,
thinking, learning and reasoning which are considered as an essential
part of any human meaning-making activity are also determined by the
social and cultural world, its practices and its artefacts. More
specifically some of these studies examine the extent to which the
context determines the nature of the knowledge to be learned and the
degree to which it is respected and valued. They show how assumptions
about learning, and thus the actions expected from learners as
participants in social and learning activities, vary across and within
cultures and settings. The studies cover a range of cultures from the
Zapotec Indians in Mexico and sugar-cane farmers in Brazil to school
children and students in Belgium and Sweden, and informal learning
organisations in France.
Part 2 can, to some extent, be seen as a natural extension of Part
1, but it is more specific in that various of its studies examine
the forms of reasoning that take place in social and physical
contexts, including but not limited to logical reasoning, and ask
how these particular contexts constrain or activate different forms
of reasoning. Some of the studies also examine workplace contexts,
and reasoning and expertise within these. An underlying theme
common to all this section's chapters is the scrutiny of traditional
psychological accounts of learning and reasoning which give little
consideration to context and situation, and the search for a new
framework which takes into account such perspectives. However,
reservations are articulated by some authors about the lack of detail
within the situated learning approach: for example, how learning is
scaffolded in some of the more complex learning environments. Again
in this Part the studies cover research in a range of countries:
France, Finland, Germany, Italy, UK and US.
Part 3 focuses on new technologies. The word 'new' is used in an
attempt to distinguish between existing technologies which have
been critical in the development of humanity, and recent forms of
technology. The so-called new technologies do not merely 'silently
impregnate' the context, they interact with us. Saljo (1997)
commenting on these pointed out: "what we see in sociocultural
terms is a new division of labour between the human mind, body
and the artefact". With the new technologies, valued and powerful
information and knowledge become accessible outside the standard
recognised institutions that previously controlled and disseminated
such knowledge and information. In other words, information and
communication technologies challenge traditional boundaries between
knowledge communities and the demarcation of knowledge domains.
Consequently they call into question existing definitions of
professional and institutional roles and functions.
Part 3's theme is more diversified than the other two parts. First
we examine learning with computers and, through two reviews that
survey the integration c computers into education at all levels --
primary to tertiary, we consider not only the implications of these
new technologies for how we learn, but also how well established
learning practices are robust and do not submit to change easily.
I two further studies, attempts are made to use ideas from situated
cognition both t( better design software and also to better understand
users' attempts to work with software programmes. In the final
two chapters we go one step further and describe how the situated
cognition ideas are developed through artificial intelligence's
'situated agents' approach. Such a step shows us the difficulty
of designing autonomous agents, be they synthetic or robotic.
The difficulty does not so much reside in either the development of
hardware or the software, although clearly this is critical, but the
complexity of human thinking, learning and reasoning and how much of
this we take for granted. Chapters in this section cover research in
Belgium, France, Germany, UK and the US.
7 Concluding Summary
Saljo (1997) points out:
"... learning is the simultaneous transformation of social practices
and of individuals. Just as new technologies and new intellectual
tools transform social practices, so do they transform individuals
who walk away with a new set of instruments by means of which they
can relate to the world"
Throughout this volume we will attempt to show the symbiotic
interaction of individuals, tools, artefacts and social practices, and
the importance of this for the development of human thinking, learning
and reasoning. We shall be striving to develop a new theoretical
framework which can account for, and thus attempt to explain, the
nature of these interactions in order to better understand the role of
context and situation in thinking, learning and reasoning. The thrust
of our search for a new framework stems from the frustrations of
working with the more traditional psychological approaches which have
only paid lip service to context and situation.
In summary, all three parts highlight a range of issues of which
only a few can be mentioned here, but which represent the research
programme as a whole: (i) the inseparability of knowledge and values
and the need for an understanding of which forms of knowledge are
privileged, with reference to everyday and informal knowledge; (ii)
the positioning of learners and an understanding of what it takes,
on the part of the learner, to be able to act competently within one
particular framing of what it means to learn; (iii) the importance
of contextual factors: the shift from their being considered as
moderators of thinking and reasoning to their being seen as a
constituent of thought leading to the recognition that dealing with
problems is very much a contextual affair.
With new types of tools and technologies, we will show that although
new information and communication technologies make possible novel
kinds of learning interactions within and across learning sites,
it is not so clear how some of the more traditional sites of
learning accommodate these changes. In fact, well-established and
well-respected learning customs and practices appear to resist many
of these changes. Indeed, even though information and communication
technology can be seen as providing direct access to knowledge,
bypassing traditional forms of teaching and learning, in order
for information to become knowledge it needs to be constructed and
validated through communicative and interpretative processes in
concrete human practices.
Many of these issues will reveal the importance of the social
and cultural world, its practices and its artefacts, and how they
influence and often determine the outcomes. The world in which
intelligence is exercised is a world which has been shaped, and
continues to be shaped, by the intelligent activities of others.
PART 1
Learning and the Negotiation of Meaning Introduction by Roger Saljo
[...]
The chapters of this first section of the volume all analyse how
meaning is created and negotiated by people operating with cultural
tools in concrete activities (cf. Wertsch, 1998; Mercer, 1995; Saljo,
1996). In Chapter 2, Guida de Abreu reports a study of mathematics
learning inside and outside the formal school system. This work
has been carried out among sugar-cane farmers and their families in
Brazil. De Abreu describes the nature of the traditional measurement
and counting systems that are unique to this trade, and the skill
with which farmers are able to use them when reasoning about their
crops, the payment they receive, the size of their land and so on.
In addition, the author illustrates how this system for measuring
and counting is not valid in all contexts of the Brazilian society.
For instance, new technologies or new systems of supporting and/or
financing the farming industry may call for the adoption of more
traditional measurement systems. Banks and state agencies may not
recognise the indigeneous systems for measuring as valid, and they
may demand conversion to a metric system with which the farmers are
unfamiliar. The school is also a problem in a similar manner. The
children's mastery of the traditional mathematical reasoning will take
them nowhere in this particular setting. However, perhaps the most
interesting aspect of the study is the manner in which the author
documents how children of sugar-cane families learn to see their own
knowledge as an inferior kind of knowl-edge, and that of the more
formal mathematics taught in school as superior. This implies that
issues of what de Abreu refers to as valorisation of knowledge must
be added to the agenda when studying how knowledge is reproduced
in society. It is impossible to separate knowledge and values, and
understanding learning is very much about understanding what forms of
knowledge are privileged, for instance, by formal schooling.
In Chapter 3, Chris Sinha discusses what it implies to be a learner,
and what one has to know in order to fulfil the communicative
obligations of acting as a competent learner in a particular activity.
Assumptions about learning, and thus the actions expected by learners
as participants of social activities, vary across cultures and
settings. The Western tradition of separating teaching and learning
from production implies that children qua learners have a different
relation to what they produce in comparison to what would be the case
in societies in which teaching and learning are part of the primary
production of goods and services necessary for daily living. Thus,
when artefacts are produced in a school-like situation, the expectancy
is generally not that they are going to work as a practical device
in some future situation. Rather, the making and the creation of
an artefact per se is the main point of the task. Sinha contrasts
this attitude, and this positioning of the child as a learner, with
observations made among pre-schoolers in a Zapotec village in southern
Mexico. Here children, inducted into the skill of making a pot,
are also learning to be producers in the sense of learning how to
be actors in an economically important activity. These differences
between cultures and social systems should alert us to the ways in
which children (and adults) are positioned as learners in different
activities, and what it takes on the part of the learner to be able
to act competently within one particular framing of what it means to
learn.
The setting in which Nathalie Muller and Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont
analyse learning (Chapter 4) reflects cultural changes, albeit in a
slightly different manner. The context here is the activities within
a social movement originating in France and working towards creating
new modes of communicating knowledge and skills. The idea behind
so-called knowledge exchange networks (or KENs) is to provide
a context in which potential teachers and learners can meet and
exchange knowledge outside formal schooling. People who want to learn
something simply put up a note about the theme or skill which they
are interested in acquiring, and someone who feels they have knowledge
to offer responds. And a certain reciprocity is expected -- those
who want to learn should also be prepared to act as teachers in other
fields. These spontaneously created groups with shared interests
then continue their interaction as long as they find it productive.
The initiator of this movement originally saw KENs as a way of
making scientific knowledge available to a broader audience, but
any topic of teaching and learning may be offered/sought: cooking,
foreign languages, comput-ing, and so on. The authors have carried
out fieldwork on KENs in Strasbourg, and they report on the manner
in which people interact and construe the object of knowledge when
learning under these conditions. They also illustrate how people
acting as teachers and students, respectively, negotiate their
positions during sessions, and how conflicts in expectations are
handled by participants.
The two remaining chapters of this part take us into the context of
formal schooling and illustrate the nature of reasoning meaning-making
that students engage in within such settings. But again, the core
issue concerns how children operating in the context of school
construe meaning, and how they are able to use linguistic and physical
tools when reasoning. Erik De Corte, Lieven Verschaffel, Sabien
Lasure, Inge Borghart and Hajime Yoshida report on a series of
provocative studies on children's mathematical reasoning in the
context of solving word problems in Chapter 5. Such problems are
supposed to serve as contexts in which children learn to handle
real-life situations by means of the mathematical reasoning acquired
through schooling. Basically, the problem addressed originates
in observations made in a number of studies in many countries
on children's apparent insensitivity to what word problems mean.
Even problems that do not make sense in terms of the situations they
depict, or that do not provide relevant information, are solved as
if they were. For instance, a problem such as "John's best time to
run 100 metres is 17 seconds. How long will it take John to travel
I kilometre?" is solved by an overwhelming majority of children as
if it were possible to make a linear prediction from the former to
the latter. It would be easy to interpret children's failures to
handle these situations as a lack of knowledge of what constitutes
appropriate mathematical reasoning, but the authors illustrate that
this is hardly the most likely explanation. Rather, by modifying the
contextual conditions under which children work when solving problems
of this kind, the results become very different and much more
encouraging.
Jan Wyndhamn and Roger Saljo (Chapter 6) analyse how children reason
when quantifying time. The point of departure for the empirical work
was the finding in national evaluations in Sweden that children have
considerable difficulties in solving problems of the following kind:
How many days are there from March 24 until June 18? The performance
level for this kind of task is surprisingly low, and, furthermore,
students do not seem to get very much better at handling them as a
consequence of further exposure to mathematics teaching. In the study
reported, it is shown that the issue of the extent to which children
are able to deal with this problem is very much a contextual affair.
For instance, when given an artefact such as a calendar as a resource,
the problem becomes very easy to handle successfully because the
calendar invokes a counting rather than a subtraction strategy. In a
similar fashion, using your fingers for counting the number of days,
which is generally considered a primitive method in formal mathematics
teaching, is also efficient.
PART 2
Learning and Reasoning in Context Introduction by Paul Light
In introducing the first part of this book, Roger Saljo highlighted
the fact that much of psychology is unduly preoccupied with what
takes place inside people's heads. In a variety of ways, the chapters
making up that first Part illustrated the fact that understanding
psychological activity often depends at least as much upon
understanding social and cultural processes of negotiating meaning as
it does on individual psychological processes.
This theme is continued in this, the second part of the book.
Once again we shall see a recurrent tension between traditional
psychological approaches which take little account of context, and
other recent approaches which, by contrast, give context and situation
pride of place in accounting for learning and reasoning.
These tensions are not addressed as a one-sided argument in favour
of 'situated' learning and reasoning. The chapters making up this
Part find weaknesses as well as strengths in situated approaches
to both learning and reasoning. Nonetheless, the extent to which
such approaches pervade contemporary analyses of both education and
psychology is well illustrated here.
The chapters themselves range in subject matter from early conceptual
development to adult reasoning, from the classroom to the company
archive, and from children's play to the work of a systems analyst.
Yet, despite this diversity the commonality of the underlying themes
remains clear. Perhaps the central issue is how to reconcile the
evidence for situational dependency in so much of what we do or say
with the evidence for continuity and coherence in our experience and
behaviour over time. [...]
Renkl, Gruber and Mandl (Chapter 7) explore the tension, which has
been apparent for some years now, between established approaches to
the psychology of instruc-tion and contemporary situated approaches.
The proponents of the latter criticise traditional methods of
classroom instruction for delivering only 'inert' knowledge --
knowledge which may be reproducible to order in school tests but which
does not effectively engage with or support effective practice in the
domain in question. There are clear echoes here of those chapters in
the previous section which addressed the nature of 'school knowledge'.
A number of psychologists and educationalists, especially in the
United States, have come up with alternative approaches to learning in
the classroom which seek to anchor instruction in authentic practice.
For Renkl and colleagues, though, these approaches are seen to suffer
a number of limitations.
Situated approaches to instruction, they argue, tend to be
insufficiently specified, particularly in respect of how learners
are to be supported in their exploration of learning resources.
This issue is perhaps particularly critical in the computer-supported
learning environments which Renkl and colleagues are concerned with.
[...]
Whether these criticisms are properly directed at situated approaches
to learning per se, as against certain attempts to apply them in
classroom education, is a moot point. However, Renkl and colleagues
render a useful service in reminding us of some of the enduring
realities of educational experience and of the need to examine
empiri-cal evidence before plunging too enthusiastically into
wholesale curriculum change. The chapter by Rizzo, Marti, Veneziano
and Bagnara (Chapter 8) explores the relationship between the
psychology of reasoning, which typically focuses on the individual,
and working settings in which most reasoning takes place in shared
contexts. As Rizzo and colleagues point out, there is a sense in
which not only individuals but also organisations can be said to
learn. They may also be prone to forget. The collective aspects of
knowledge production and maintenance, and the way in which collective
knowledge resides in the practices of the workforce, have become much
more widely recognised in recent years. Rizzo and colleagues argue
that the compu-terisation of the workplace may prejudice some well
established processes of collective learning, including the induction
of new staff into existing patterns of practice.
[...]
The emphasis on logical inference in social context is continued
in the following chapter, by Blaye, Ackermann and Light (Chapter 9).
Drawing on both Piagetian cognitive developmental psychology and the
psychology of adult reasoning, Blaye and colleagues critique the idea
that logic can be seen as offering an abstract 'syntax' of mature
thinking and reasoning. Their suggestion is that, on the contrary,
pragmatic considerations of relevance-to-context actually seem to
shape much of the thinking and reasoning not only of children but also
of adults.
[...]
The same issue of whether psychological development can be seen in
terms of abstraction of one kind or another exercises Bliss, Ogborn,
Cronin, Reader and Tsatsarelis in the following chapter (Chapter
10). The essential tension addressed in this chapter is between
the Piagetian 'epistemic subject', developed through a process
of reflective abstraction, and the 'actual subject' engaging in
physical abstraction on the basis of particular lived experiences
in a particular physical world. Although Piaget is often said to
have pictured the child as a 'scientist', in his own work he made
surprisingly little reference to the development of children's
understanding of physical entities and their properties. Whereas
Piaget's 'logical schemes' may be context free, 'physical schemes'
cannot be. Similarly, while the process of reflective abstraction
which generates logical schemes can be seen as an activity of a
notional or 'epistemic' subject, the process of empirical abstraction
which underpins physical schemes must be domain specific, and must
rest on particular experiences.
[...]
In the final chapter of the second part (Chapter 12), Etelapelto and
Light return to the issue of instruction with which this Part began.
They explore the limitations of context-independent models of design
expertise, and how such expertise is acquired. Etelapelto and Light
argue that design expertise is typically opportunistic in character,
and responsive to context and situation. But 'context' has diachronic
as well as synchronic aspects; it develops its significance over time
through the life and experience of the individual. Learning is part
and parcel of identity formation, and the development of a particular
professional identity has considerable implications for the uses
to which acquired expertise is put. Etelapelto and Light seek to
illustrate this thesis through a study of software developers and
systems analysts as they move through the transition from instruction
to early work experience.
At a time when there is so much public and political debate about the
functions of higher education in relation to subsequent employment,
it is perhaps surprising that there is not more research on the
continuities and discontinuities marking the transition from study to
work. Not only could such work be highly policy-relevant, it could
also provide a valuable test-bed for ideas about situated learning and
the transfer-ability of understanding.
The issue of transfer is not extensively or frequently addressed in
the chapters which make up this part. Underlying all of the tensions
explored in these chapters -- between cognition as abstract ('in
the head') and cognition as inhering in the relationship between
an individual and a particular social or physical context -- there
is an issue of 'what transfers' as individuals move through their
lives, encoun-tering and participating in one situation after another.
Arguably, none of the chapters offers any wholly satisfactory solution
to this problem (if problem it really is). However, each of them
in its different way contributes valuable illumination of the broader
issue of how learners' engagement with their physical and social
worlds conditions their learning, their reasoning and their behaviour.
PART 3
Learning with and by Machines Introduction by Joan Bliss
The focus of this book is on human learning, reasoning and thinking
in different social and technological contexts, and the manner in
which these practices and artefacts together help to determine the
way in which people approach situations. In the first Part there
was a specific focus on the manner in which meaning is created
and negotiated by people operating with cultural tools in concrete
activities. While Part Two continues this theme, there is a more
specific focus on how contexts constrain or facilitate human thinking
and actions. More particularly, it looks at the tension between
traditional psychological approaches, which take little account of
context and situation and the situated learning perspective, which
gives context and situation pride of place in accounting for learning
and reasoning. Part Three chooses a more specific focus in that it
examines how new technologies, or new forms of artefacts, are becoming
part of the contexts in which we learn, reason and think. It sets
out to understand the extent to which people can appropriate these new
technologies as tools for their thinking, and whether or not these new
approaches can enhance their learning, reasoning and thinking.
[...]
New information and communication technologies make it possible
to retain huge quantities of valued and powerful information and
knowledge without a problem; space requirements are now of an
altogether different kind. Also ICT transforms the way in which
knowledge can be distributed in and between learning sites. Such
knowl-edge and information, stored in personal computers or tracked
through electronic mail or internet connections, is now accessible
outside the standard recognised insti-tutions. Thus ICT challenges
traditional boundaries between knowledge communities and the
demarcation of knowledge domains. So we can ask: "What will count as
epistemic authority in a society of distributed knowledge and how will
this authority be exercised?"
[...]
The first four chapters in this Part involve learning with computers.
Thus we examine the importance and the nature of educational settings
or contexts in which computers are used: first in schools, and then
in universities. Then we look at software tools: in a first instance
at how ideas from situated learning have influenced their design, and
in the second case, how the user's situated knowledge both enhances
and hinders the use of IT tools. In the last two chapters we turn to
learning by machines, and the situated agents movement in artificial
intelligence which will be familiar to those in the field. While
the situated agents approach may have had its roots in cognitive
psychology, quite often its later developments are so different from
its origins that it is not always possible to see the links. These
two chapters about situated agents attempt to build these links.
Recent research would indicate that learning with computers -- whether
at a fundamental school level or in the discipline of, say, computer
science at the tertiary level -- is becoming a genderised issue in
much the same way as the learning of physics or chemistry, where
boys and later young men would seem to dominate the scene, at least
in many European countries. Littleton and Bannert's survey of the
area shows, however, that the issue is subtle at two different levels.
First, Littleton and Bannert refer to the work of Huff and Cooper
(1987) which points out, "... that it is not the computer or even
the software that is at the root of sex bias in software, but the
expectations and stereotypes of the designers of the software"
(p. 519). Second, they analyse a number of studies, including their
own, which indicate that even when software has no obvious gender
connotation, a sex bias is introduced by the "particular contexts and
situations which constitute girls' and boys' experience of computing
activities". In other words, through the analysis of the social
contexts of young people's computing activities we can begin to
understand the importance of either the social situation or even
the activity itself. For example, we learn that the framing of an
activity as a 'game' or as a particular type of task can deter girls
from or attract girls to working with computers and, of course,
similarly for boys.
Similarly through Crook and Light's examination of issues related to
the greater deployment of computers in order to allow teaching and
learning to be more flexible and more affordable, we become aware of
the importance of the analysis of the learning contexts. Crook and
Light show that learning with computers in universities does not take
place in a type of neutral zone; existing educational practices have
a long historical development and, whether we like it or not, these
circumscribe the ways in which today's students learn.
Crook and Light's studies are diverse -- from self-report surveys
of study practices during examination revision to students working
together on academic problems. They also paid particular attention
to the informal, out-of-class experience of study, for example,
the possibilities for informal collaboration with peers and informal
contact with tutors that arise from participating in a full time
community of study. Their results give food for thought when
they state, "... our results confirm us in the view that students
are enculturated into particular communities of learning, and the
resulting practices will offer resistance to the 'bolting on' of new
educational technologies".
Both these chapters serve as a warning since through their analyses
the authors are able to show that: "Far from revolutionising society,
the computer has conformed to society, becoming another element of the
status quo" (Reisman, 1990, p. 45). Yet, perhaps again they reflect
the nature of the transition from an industrial to a technological
society. Perhaps at the moment those who work with new technologies
are, as Crook and Light point out, highly self-selecting and may still
be small in number. Perhaps such studies can provide information
about what is both sufficient and necessary to make the new
technologies more powerful resources through being more properly
integrated into a culture we understand more fully.
Huff and Cooper point out that, "... gender stereotypes in educational
software often arise as a direct result of the designers' expectations
about potential users" (Huff and Cooper, 1987). Not only are the
designer's expectations critical but also the theoretical perspectives
that inform his or her implementation of the software design.
Luckin's chapter takes inspiration from the situated learning
perspective to design a new learning environment, VIS, which is part
of a larger system called TRIVAR (Luckin, 1996). VIS allows the user
(children between 10-11 years) to create a mini ecosystem through the
selection of animals and plants which share a common habitat; these
elements are then, through a range of activities, built into a food
web.
One of the key situated learning concepts which underlies the design
of VIS is what Vygotsky called the 'zone of proximal development' or
the ZPD. Crucial to the ZPD is the distinction Vygotsky draws between
a child's actual level of development and his or her potential level,
that which can be reached with the assistance of the able peer,
parent, teacher or in this case, the computer. Wood, Bruner and Ross
(1976), referring to the ZPD, coined, at that time, a term to describe
this process of outside help.
... (it) involves a kind of 'scaffolding' process that enables a
child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a
goal which would be beyond his unassisted efforts (p. 90).
Thus, understanding and implementing the strategy of an able teacher
is essential to the VIS environment. Luckin has used Wood's later
work (Wood et al., 1993) to implement the scaffolding approach in her
software. This involves five levels of hints or scaffolding as well
as ways of adjusting or differentiating the activities provided to
the child, in other words, "... 18 possible combinations of help and
activity adjustment". This is only part of the story in the design of
this software -- for example, the student model and the knowledge base
are equally as complex.
Teaching is an activity that is often taken for granted. Most of us
believe that, given we know some area reasonably well, we could teach
it. Reading Luckin's chapter brings home very sharply the complexity
of the activity of teaching and makes us rethink again the talents
needed to do such a job. Let us hope that Luckin's software achieves
at least some of the success of an ordinary school teacher!
Corruble and Bliss in their chapter present two research directions
which use computational methods to aid learning about the world.
In both cases, computational modelling and simulation are helpful in
externalising some key assumptions embedded in individuals' internal
representations of the world. The approaches are however different
in the specific tasks they assist. A dynamic modelling tool IQON
is used in the classroom to help students to model phenomena they
experience in their daily life (traffic congestion, fitness and diet,
shop management). CHARADE and PASTEUR are used to aid researchers
to develop causal hypotheses from a number of observations
(leprosy research, cancer research). Yet, both systems address the
situatedness of the task they assist through a constructive approach
to modelling, by taking advantage of the trial-and-error capability of
computational simulations to resolve the discrepancy between model's
behaviour and modeller's expectations. Our examples illustrate how
computational tools offer the possibility of being used simultaneously
as a medium and as a mirror. As medium, users can externalise their
thinking through modelling, as a mirror through the simulation of the
model which reflects back to the user the true face of what has been
externalised.
[...]
end
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