Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning

Learning takes place over long periods of time that are hard to study directly. Even the learning experience involved in solving a challenging math problem in a collaborative online setting can be spread across hundreds of brief postings during an hour or more. Such long-term interactions are constructed out of posting-level interactions, such as the strategic proposition of a next step. This paper identifies a pattern of exchange of postings that it terms math proposal adjacency pair, and describes its characteristics. Drawing on the methodology of conversation analysis, the paper adapts this approach to investigating mathematical problem-solving communication and to the computer-mediated circumstances of online chat. Math proposals and other interaction methods constitute the collaborative group as a working group, give direction to its problem solving and help to sustain its shared meaning making or group cognition. Groups sustain their online social and intellectual work by building up longer sequences of math proposals, other adjacency pairs and a variety of interaction methods. Experiences of collaboration and products of group cognition emerge over time.

This paper takes one step towards addressing the question of how activity mediated by shared representations — notations that are manipulated by more than one person — might constitute knowledge construction activity, and how the shared representations are appropriated for this purpose. The primary contribution of this paper is a methodology for qualitative analysis of activity in a workspace built on the concept of "uptake": how participants take up and build on prior contributions. By examining patterns of uptake we can see ways in which participants' activities constitute an intersubjective cognitive activity distributed across persons and the representations they are manipulating. The analysis is conducted in three phases: identification of acts of media manipulation, identification of information uptake relations between these acts, and application of theoretical perspectives to identify evidence of knowledge construction via the representational media. The uptake graph is intended to minimize theoretical commitments in order to support eclectic analysis. The methodology is applied to data from a prior study in which participants collaborated via an evidence map and a chat tool. These case examples illustrate how the methodology uncovered argumentation and knowledge construction conducted solely through the graph workspace.

This note introduces a special feature on the impact of information technologies on the future of learning within and outside of schools.

We argue that the inability of schools to embrace new core technologies lies in the nature of schools as social institutions. Thus the catalytic power of information technologies is likely to leave the core practices of schooling untouched, and instead open up a wide range of alternative learning venues to traditional schools. We see the seeds of a technology-driven, alternative system emerging in the recent movements toward home schooling, virtual schools, distance education, learning centers, workplace learning, and informal learning opportunities. As these venues continue to develop, we believe they will begin to converge as a viable alternative to the existing school systems.

Education has been slow to capitalize on the significant potential benefits to learning of the increased use of information technologies because teachers have, by and large, used them to automate existing classroom practices. A recent innovative Australian project sought to scale up the use of e-learning by giving students and teachers more equity in the development of projects. Students determined the questions that were of interest to them, and were then supported by teachers in designing an e-learning environment to support learning about those questions, in researching the questions, and then providing content for the final e-learning project using a range of information technologies. This approach to e-learning development has been successfully scaled-up to other topic areas within the participating schools.

Schools as social institutions are resistant to change, and the introduction of ICT (information and communication technologies) into classrooms has not yet created fundamental changes in learning and teaching in public schooling in general. Findings from international comparative studies have shown that educational innovations leveraging the potentials of technology have taken place in schools around the world and that national educational policies have major influence on the sustainability and scalability of educational innovations. This commentary draws on the policies and strategies associated with the implementation of the IT in Education masterplan in Singapore and Hong Kong to argue that there is a distinct possibility that these systems will be able to leverage the potential of ICT to bring about significant changes in public schooling within the next two decades.

Japanese schools may start using technology to benefit education, though the shift itself would happen in a culturally bound way. In addition, Japan has unique problems like the language barrier she has to solve if she recognizes the possible "inequity" foreseen and feared by Halverson and Collins.

In response to Halverson and Collins' paper, the author reports her reflection and concerns of the diffusion of information technology for education in Taiwan, including national IT projects, barriers for using of IT technologies in core teaching practices, and alternative ways in informal learning based on her past experiences in conducting related studies.