I’ve almost given up trying to get my head into the Vygotsky and Pedagogy book I’ve been trying to read. There’s an indistinct barrier between me and the text. I don’t seem to be able to read it in any intelligent way. There are too many demands on my thought processes. And then, I’m supposed to be on holidays, but have been trying (unsuccessfully) to catch up on some research.
I think part of the problem is that the research I have been doing has been rather superficial (at least in my mind) and doesn’t really engage with the theoretical framework I developed for my PhD (which seems oh, so long ago). My focus for the last few years has been on teaching – on bringing the concepts of learning about technology into the 21st century. As I often jokingly say to Luke: we’re on the cutting edge of six months ago[1]. The course we developed – Business Informatics, really is a different approach to learning and teaching information systems/technology. We’ve moved beyond the ‘this is a computer, this in an information system, this is a database, this is how you make them’ to a course that essentially says ‘here is the world we are making, how will you make sense of it?’
But I do miss the research I was doing. I’ve been trying to entice another colleague into writing more about Vygotsky, but to date, it has not been high on his priorities. I keep pushing that research into the background, waiting for some feedback, hoping to get some collaboration going, which is ironic, seeing I’m supposed to be a collaboration expert.
But, I decided this morning to go back to the original source, that is, my thesis, particularly the theoretical chapter and try to get back into that headspace. I started reading it and was really struck by the first paragraph of the chapter. I’ve paraphrased it slightly, actually it’s more recontextualised as a statement of the research I want to do, what I want to focus on, where everything I’m interested in comes together.
My research investigates interactions between and among humans and between artefacts and humans as these are central features of mediated learning and the effective mediation between individuals by electronic tools. This is essential to the process of appropriating socially constituted, but electronically mediated instruction. Specifically, individuals are held to construct their own knowledge separately or as a part of social processes (Holman et al., 1997, Grossen, 2000). Interaction potentially is held to mediate this construction by both enabling and constraining these processes. I examine the complex relationship among humans, learning, technology and content to understand the pedagogic scope and potential of learning environments. This requires specific attention to both discussions of interaction between humans as mediated by electronic media and its relation to learning, and to those technologies that mediate between individuals in social processes of learning, which collectively constitutes the means of mediating interaction.
The original focus of that paragraph was online learning environments, but I believe that all learning now is technologically mediated, whether we believe that technology is complex, as in a computer, or more simple, as in a classroom[2]. I’m sensing a vague connection between this approach to technology and the ways in which certain current debates are being framed. I need to rethink some of this.
Hi, I just parachuted into your world from Luke’s blog!
I’m no pedagogue, so I have to admit that I have only the vaguest notion of what you’re talking about, but fools rush in…
First I want to make a clear distinction between learning and teaching. In my view, learning is not the complement of teaching. If we use the term “knowledge” to refer to both what is taught and what is learned, then we reduce the teaching/learning process to communication or mediation, which I would regard as a flawed model. Actually, I would resist use of the term “knowledge” in this context, not just for philosophical reasons, but because it reinforces a bias towards information that can be reduced to propositions.
From the point of view of the individual learner, the results of learning are to be found in the different capacities possessed after the learning process. (In this sense, “unlearning” is a special case of learning, involving the loss of capacities or ceasing to rely on pre-existing capacities.) Teaching provides a context within which learning is supposed to take place. I labour this point because it seems to me that “learning”, in this sense, need not be “technologically mediated”, if you believe, as I do, that the individual mind can restructure pre-existing “knowledge” into new forms without the need for an external stimulus. Whereas without the intention that “learning” should take place, “teaching” hardly seems to be a meaningful act but, more importantly, such an intention alone cannot constitute “teaching” unless there is some way in which it impinges upon the learner (or, at least, the learner’s context). To this extent, we can regard “teaching” as “technologically mediated”: the learner’s context is altered as a result of the intention that learning should occur.
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alison reply on January 16th, 2009:
Thanks for your comment, Alan.
Yes, I agree that teaching and learning are only vaguely related concepts that don’t always happen concurrently. But, the point of Vygotsky’s work was to show that all learning is mediated by ‘tools’. These tools, including language, are technologies in the broadest sense (that is, technologies are not necessarily ‘technical’, particularly as we use the word now). Once language is viewed as a technology, you can only conclude that learning is technologically mediated (that is, through language). Mediation itself is a more complex term in this framework and the ‘teacher’ may be but one form of ‘mediational means’ to learning. So teaching is not ‘technologically’ mediated, but learning is. Teaching is but one process through which the learner is exposed to, and engages with, concepts.
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AlanAJ01 reply on January 16th, 2009:
Thank you for responding. I find myself unmoved by the force of the argument, however. More importantly, I don’t think that it matters to me one way or another. What I believe is crucial in the field of untaught learning where I operate is that my collaborators and I all have an understanding of how things are and how they could be. Whether these separate understandings need to be shared, and hence learned, is one question. But clearly any such sharing must involve mediation. I’m inclined to the view, however, that the collaborative task is to synthesise in the individual minds of each collaborator new understandings that have more in common with each other and are more useful models for our collective purposes.
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