- suggesting that strategies of social control make the difference.
In my thesis study where I also found contrasting cases of
novice-expert interaction, I found that strategies of social
control helped, but what seemed to make the difference was the
novice students' respective orientations toward text. The project
context was ambiguously designed, and therefore the story is
complicated. I think the complication may be fruitful, but it
is too much to explicate here. 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.
So a project (activity) will be more likely to
accommodate differences in expertise if participants are
equally invested in some goal that they define similarly,
and where that goal is a text that can be variously
manipulated without changing the nature of the goal.
No real news here. The news will come through figuring
out how to make negotiation over goals more possible
across differences in expertise.
- Judy
Judy Diamondstone
diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Rutgers University
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