The second chapter of my thesis started focusing on the research in mediated learning. When I wrote it, the central idea was that online learning environments needed to foster interaction between people. There seems to some assumptions (that are still floating around, although not so strongly) that putting things online would be cheaper, easier and able to do more with fewer resources (most likely the teacher’s time). These assumptions are not borne out by experience or the research. Teaching online is very intensive and takes much practice to get right. The biggest difference between now and when I wrote my thesis is that I believe all teaching (face-to-face, online and blended) is very intensive and takes much practice to get right.
The quote by Suchman still holds but I’d expand it to include all interactions, between people and machines and between people. I don’t think it yet holds for interactions between machines, but I can’t say that that will remain the case. I’ve highlighted the part of the quote that holds particularly for interactions between people – the tension between the writer’s intent and the reader’s intent.
First, that the problem of mutual intelligibility between humans and machines recommends a research agenda aimed less at the creation of interactive machines, than at the writing of dynamic artefacts intended to be legible, or intelligible to their users. This shift brings a rich set of resources from recent reconceptualizations of what writing and reading involve, including the inevitable uncertainties in relations of writer’s intentions to readers’ interpretations, and the active role of the reader in giving life and meaning to the text. And this approach encourages us to explore and articulate the particular dynamics of computational artefacts, and what new possibilities those dynamics afford. (Suchman, 1997, italics added)
There are many interpretations of any text which gives rise to the need to explore the dynamics of people interacting, because we do not yet completely understand that, particularly with the interaction of different cultures across the globe. The direction of my research remains the same – how do we mediate learning and how can we understand those processes. There’s a series of posts coming up on those ideas based mainly on my theoretical chapter, but also looking toward the future.
The introduction to this chapter included the Suchman quote above. There’s a fashion of starting chapters with a pithy quote, but this chapter was the only one that did that. The quote gave me a starting point – the dynamics of computational artefacts – which underpin ‘online learning’.
{Begin extract}
This chapter proposes that interactions between and among humans and between artefacts and humans are central features of mediated learning and that we need to explore and articulate the particular dynamics of our interactions with computational artefacts as proposed by Suchman (1997) above. Moreover, the effective mediation between individuals by electronic tools is essential to the process of appropriating socially constituted, but electronically mediated, instruction or online learning. Specifically, individuals are held to construct their own knowledge separately or as a part of social processes (Holman, Pavlica and Thorpe, 1997, Grossen, 2000). Online interaction potentially is held to mediate this construction by both enabling and constraining these processes. This chapter discusses the complex relationship among humans, learning, technology and content in an attempt to understand the pedagogic scope and potential of online learning environments. This requires specific attention be paid to both discussions of interaction between humans as mediated by electronic media and its relation to learning. This is applicable to those technologies that mediate between individuals in social processes of learning, which collectively constitute the means of mediating interaction.
{End extract}
Five years on, I’ve broadened my research so the focus is less on the technology and more on the people. All learning is mediated, whether by language, computers or other artefacts, so the processes being investigated are able to be expanded beyond a simple binary of with computers or without. My thesis focused on the process of appropriating socially constructed, but electronically mediated, instruction – aka online learning, although a statement of my research goals now would remove ‘electronically’ from ‘but electronically mediated’. As I explain later in the thesis, all learning is mediated and indeed all interactions between people are mediated. It’s a simple statement that took thirty pages to elaborate.
References
Suchman, L. (1997) from Interactions to Integrations: A reflection on the future of HCI, In Interact 97:6th IFIP International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction – Discovering New Worlds of HCI, Human-computer interaction – INTERACT ’97, Howard, S., Hammond, J. and Lindgaard, G. (Eds) Chapman & Hall (London, UK), Sydney, Australia
Grossen, M. (2000) Institutional Framings in Thinking, Learning and Teaching, in Social Interaction in Learning and Instruction: The Meaning of Discourse for the Construction of Knowledge, Cowie, H. and van der Aalsvoort, G. (Eds) Pergamon, Amsterdam.
Holman, D., Pavlica, K. and Thorpe, R. (1997) Rethinking Kolb’s Theory of Experiential Leaning in Management Education: The Contribution of Social Constructionism and Activity Theory, Management Learning, 28:2, pp 135-148.