Jo said:
I was really struck by Sally's statement that the PROCESS
> appears to be different for those driven by others' needs rather than their
> own.
an interesting dimension of the difference in the process is
the extent to which people recognise and act with the affordances of
the means. We were observing the patients we'd invited to use the
site in the hope of understanding better their action-with-means
(observe, log their actions and interview them afterwards). But they
largely stood outside the process 'task with resource' might be a
way to think of it. They were amenable, critical, evaluative but
unfocused in their use of the site. They could talk about the
language, images and coverage of the material on the site but none
of them talked, as did the independent users, about control or
scaffolding or the benfits of the impersonal nature of the medium or
about serendipitous discovery. Like Graham, I agree that
interviews are effective ways of finding out what people learn;
I also think that the systems with which we often 'test' computer
applications in education are as flawed as the tests we use for
children's learning.
> Because the learner's level of control (and fulfilling one's own needs)
> appears so important and perhaps easier to maximize in informal settings,
> we are interested in trying to measure that. Level of control and interest
> are commonly considered "motivational factors" that are independent
> variables affecting dependent learning variables, but maybe this is wrong.
> The motivational factor of sense of control/level of personal interest is
> NOT a constant, but another dynamic, and I think it is not off to say that
> we LEARN to be interested.
so I would love to look at how the means plays a part in this - is
the drivenness of my cancer patients in part a product of their
actions-with-means: does it increase? The evidence about use of
computers in classrooms would suggest so .... another set of
questions to look at.
Sally
>
> -Joe
>
>
>
>
Sally Tweddle, CRC Senior Fellow in Cancer Information and Education,
CRC Institute for Cancer Studies, Clinical Research Block,
University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TA
Tel: 0121 414 3550 Fax: 0121 414 3263