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. Read more of Interactions in learning