Excuse my long silence -- but school and parenting responsibilities
became overwhelming for a while there. Then we went to Beijing for two
weeks -- very interesting. Anyway...
The topic of artifacts is very interesting to me since my research
focuses on how children create multimedia artifacts. As Mike points out
in his discussion (and in another paper he did with Holland a couple years
back), the difficult part of using artifacts as a starting
point for understanding human beings psychologically and culturally
relates to the duality issue -- the artifacts' physical properties and
their symbolic, mental qualities.
I have recently been referred to the work of David R. Olson at OISE for
getting a better understanding of how the artifacts particular to
multimedia, that is, the symbolic and representational
forms used in communications media, are linked to the cognitive
development of children. His work seems to blend well with my
foundational readings of Vygotsky, Cole,
Leont'ev and Bakhtin.
Essentially,
Olson focuses on the the uses of media and literacy, and discusses how
certain media forms (artifacts-real) lead to new ways of thinking
(artifacts-ideal). The most
obvious example he cites is how the switch from an oral to a written culture
led to new thinking and reflection about the meaning and interpretation of
text.
In my work, which is at its early stages (READ: Feel free to jump in
anytime and offer ideas and suggestions), I'm looking at how
children who have created multimedia artifacts discuss what they sought
to communicate when they used a variety of
representational forms (text,
video, photographs, sound effects), and what intellectual/artifactual
(ideal/real) structures they deploy to interpret multimedia artifacts
created by their peers.
It seems a little premature to discuss my observations. But what the
heck? I noticed that in the two text-dominant multimedia stacks, there was a
higher level of agreement between what the stack designers intended to
communicate and what the stack reviewers interpreted as the message. In
the two visually-dominant multimedia stacks, there was less agreement.
After looking at the visually-dominant results again, I found that
agreement was high for one of the stacks when the designers
and the reviewers focused on -- and understood -- the same child-produced
cartoon images, but low when the reviewers "didn't get" the joke in these
cartoons. In the other stack, I noted
that agreement was low even though the designers and reviewers
focused on the exact same video, textual and audio artifacts. What happened
was they each generated differing interpretations of these "pasted-in"
professionally-produced video, audio
and textual quotations.
When looking at the textually-dominant results, I found a curious
phenonenon. In one stack, the reviewers relied upon the same artifactual
structures as the designers to discuss where the message of the stack was
best communicated. This stack, was, in more ways than one, "textbook." In
the other stack, by contrast, there was a great deal of
disagreement among all the students -- both designers and reviewers -- about
what artifactual structures best communicated
the message -- but a great deal of agreement about what the message was.
Some assembled textual snippets into a theme. Some claimed that the
overall theme was embodied in a particular page of text (A questionable
claim, in my view.) Others used impressions they drew from a single visual,
symbolic image to cast a thematic
understanding on the rest of the textual information. Another
referred to the Table of Contents, and another to the specific "link"
buttons in the Table of Contents. It's amazing -- and heartening -- to me
that they could have
so many distinct points of entry and still arrive at the same end point!
Anyway, I'm going to continue looking at these differences in structures
used for representation and interpretation, and try to get a picture of
how the interaction of different representational forms is influencing
the skills of literacy in these 5th- and 6th-graders.I should mention one
other thing -- my data was collected in a structured interview, so, as
you might imagine, there was a bit of "interaction" going on between me
and the students. I'm not sure how to incorporate this level of analysis
into the picture, but my first sense is this: I should be clear, when
reporting my results, at what times I prompted children to look at
particular artifactual structures, and then be clear about how that
"prompting" influenced the children's discussions and determinations
about what the "message" of a given stack was.
That said, I did have an editorial comment that I wanted to share with
Mike and co. on the following segment of his artifacts piece:
Rather, in being created as an embodiment of purpose and
incorporatedinto life activity in a certain
way--being manufactured for a reason and
put into use - the natural object acquires a significance. This
significance
is the "ideal form" of the object, a form that includes not a single
atom
of the tangible physical substance that possess it (Bakhurst, 1990, p.
182).
Note that in this way of thinking, mediation through artifacts also
applies
equally to objects and people. What differs in the two cases are the
ways in
which
ideality and materiality are fused among members of these two categories of
being,
and the kinds of interactivity they can enter in to.
When Mike says, "Note that in this way of thinking, mediation through
artifacts also applies equally to objects and people...," I am not sure
if my interpretation of this phrase is accurate. I think the way to
interpret this is that the properties considered psychological
and the properties considered physical have equal (or varying) weight in
any interaction between people and objects. Also, does the phrase
"two categories of being" refer to the categories of "people" and "objects"?
For now,
Louise
^^