2.2 Neo-Vygotskyian Studies and Digitally-mediated Curricula Lankshear and Knobel (2004) have drawn attention to the need to consider the implications of an ‘always-on’, large-scale, full internet wireless connected world to teaching and learning. While acknowledging that “pedagogy and curriculum cannot be hostaged to every change in cultural tools and uses”, they suggest that “if limits to learners’ affinities, identities and prior experience are transgressed beyond a certain point, even ‘successful’ learners (with the right cultural and social capital) will decline the offers made by formal education”.
As evidence, they quote Thorne’s (2003) study on a foreign-language course at an American university, which was designed to incorporate a range of computer-mediated-collaborative tools and activities, such as email, instant messaging and video-conferencing. In particular, Thorne described the case of two of the participants who refused to use email to communicate with their French key-pals, despite the fact that email was integral to the course assessment, because of their association of email with “communication between power levels and generations” (Thorne, 2003:7).
In outlining their ‘pedagogical principles for i-Mode’ – the latter so-named after the nationwide wireless broadband internet access service for handhelds and mobile telephony provided in Japan – Lankshear and Knobel first outline three basic tenets which inform the effective operationalising of their principles. These are, namely, that:
• Curriculum and pedagogy must not be hostaged to technological change at the level of artifacts;
• When the gap between school and non-school practices gets too wide, even ‘good’ (in school terms) students start to opt out; and
• The incorporation of Gee’s (2003) principles of effective learning (as exemplified by commercially-successful electronic games) into school learning, on the basis of their respective appropriacies to education, should drive any such pedagogical intervention.
The first principle that the preceding tenets describe is efficacious learning. That is to say, what the learner learns should be connected in meaningful and motivating ways to insider Discourses (where ‘Discourses’ are sets of related social practices such that one enacts a particular social identity (Gee, Hull and Lankshear, 1996)). Echoing directly a Vygotskyian (1978) conception of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), Lankshear and Knobel (2004) elaborate that “to learn something is to progress toward a fuller understanding and fluency with doing, in ways that are recognized as proficient relative to socially constructed ways of being”.
The second principle described is integrated learning – that is, it follows from the first principle that learning is inseparable from Discourses; as such, learning can be considered ‘integrated’ when
• it occurs inside a practice (though in situ participation),
• the individual elements that comprise social practices are learned in their relationships to one another (as a consequence of learning them inside each practice), and
• the identity the learner is called to adopt within the particular learning instance is in minimal conflict with other identities.
The third principle is that of productive appropriation and extension. That is, in looking for ways to reduce conflict between social identities during learning, it should be borne in mind that if learners already know how to perform certain discursive roles and tasks that can be carried over into the new Discourse, this can be used to enable learning and proficiency in the new area.
The final principle is that of critical learning – assuming that the more effective learning inside a Discourse is, the less critically reflective the learner’s perspective on the Discourse is likely to be, curriculum designers should therefore take care to design explicitly for the development and negotiation of differing points of view on the practices, identities, and institutions of a variety of Discourses.
Taken together, the above principles are helpful in approaching neo-Vygotskyian innovations in digitally-mediated curricula, such as the intervention described in this thesis. To some extent, parallels can also be drawn between the present intervention and various after-school learning initiatives, such as the Fifth Dimension (Cole, 1995) and, more recently, the Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth (Hull and Zacher, 2004).
To elaborate on the former, the Fifth Dimension has been described as a “distributed literacy consortium of after-school enrichment programs” (Blanton, Greene and Cole, 2003: 248). It was designed in the 1980s by the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, which is presently based at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). These programs involve cooperation between local community organizations, and are affiliated with local colleges and universities.
Essentially, Fifth Dimension programs present children and adolescents with opportunities to engage in a variety of group-based activities, such as board- and computer-games, drawing, and reading. The programs are also characterized by the presence of older participants (such as university students and adult volunteers) who guide the participation (Rogoff, 1995) of the younger ones in the latters’ ZPDs, through goal-setting and decision-making in relation to the activities at hand.
Evaluations of Fifth Dimension programs have generally shown that elementary school children who attend for fifteen or more sessions over several months show improved scores on school-district tests in reading and math problem solving, amongst other measures (Mayer et al, 1997; Schustack, Strauss and Worden, 1997). A Cognitive Evaluation team also found that children were able to transfer their learning experiences from participation in the programs to other problem-solving contexts (Blanton et al, 1997). Further, in cases where the children were non-native English speakers, there was evidence that participation in the programs served not only to maintain competence in the mother tongue, but also to facilitate the acquisition of spoken and written English (Gallego, Moll and Rueda, 1997).
As an example, one iteration of the Fifth Dimension is located at UCSD itself. La Clase Mágica (LCM) is supported by the Solana Beach Boys and Girls Club, and operates from a Catholic mission. La Clase Mágica caters to both preschoolers (twice a week) and children in elementary school (thrice weekly). About twenty to forty children attend LCM on a typical day. La Clase Mágica attempts to engage parents through initiatives such as open houses and computer-literacy classes. La Clase Mágica was developed by Vásquez (2002), with an explicit goal of honoring the culture of the local population. As such, the sub-parts of the program (so-called ‘rooms’ of the ‘maze’) are named after people and places of special significance to the Mexicano population.
Another example of the Fifth Dimension, this time at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is Club Proteo. Like La Clase Mágica, Club Proteo is organized in conjunction with the local Boys and Girls Club, and caters to the needs of about twenty to thirty children daily. Similarly, Club Proteo’s target group are also Mexicano and Latino children of immigrant, low income families. The goal of the program is to strengthen understandings and connections between this demographic group and the wider community. It attempts to do this by modeling the rooms of the maze after actual community institutions, such as the local newspaper office, the car dealership, and the radio station.
It should be clear from the preceding two examples that several of Lankshear’s and Knobel’s (2004) pedagogical principles have informed the implementation of well-designed Fifth Dimension programs. Such principles include that of efficacious learning (in which the children work within their respective ZPDs towards social proficiency within the larger community), as well as that of productive appropriation and extension (in which the learning tasks are situated within familiar skills).
As alluded to earlier, parallels can also be drawn between the various Fifth Dimension programs and the present intervention described in this thesis, not least of which being the interaction between peers, in after-school community-located settings, in learning tasks which serve to encourage the appropriation and extension of skills and habits of mind associated with digital literacies.
It should be noted that studies of activity theory, as applied to the acquisition and shaping of digital literacies, can also be applied to contexts in which cooperative groupwork is less explicitly evident. For example, Selfe and Hawisher (2002) studied the oral histories of eighteen individuals, representing a range of demographic sub-groups and drawn from a larger study of 350 informants, with respect to their experiences with computers, through what they term as ‘electronic literacy autobiographies’. These autobiographies were, in turn, situated within the context of evolving cultural ecologies (defined as “the existing stock of social forces and ideas” (Deibert, 1997)) and historical timelines.
For example, Selfe and Hawisher drew attention to the two sets of literacy skills and values first required to be practiced and held by Baby Boomers, during the 1970s and early 1980s. These contrasting sets of skills and values were conventional print literacy acquired from formal schooling, and electronic literacy – the latter was primarily developed on-the-job. This description is akin to what Cole (Griffin and Cole, 1984; Cole, 1988) has termed the quarternary tensions which manifest themselves between competing activity systems.
Such tensions are symptomatic of what Mead (1970) termed ‘prefigurative cultures’ (in which change is so rapid that adults lack the necessary knowledge and abilities to pass on to the next generation, because they themselves have never had the experiences that they are trying to prepare their children for) and take time to be resolved (if ever). The dichotomy represented by these tensions is, of course, evident even today.
Within the discipline of geography itself, not many studies have explicitly drawn their roots from activity theory. Nonetheless, almost any fieldwork endeavour can be viewed through neo-Vygotskyian lenses. The work of Hurley, Proctor and Ford (1999) is typical. Reporting on the work done by the Comparative Environmental Change seminar of 1997, which was designed to facilitate online collaborative inquiry between teams of geography and environmental studies undergraduates from the University of California at Santa Barbara and Westminster College in Utah, Hurley, Proctor and Ford describe how teams of three or four students at each school were tasked with researching human-induced environmental change within a regional mountain ecosystem (the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, respectively), and then comparing the findings with the teams from the other school.
In terms of activity theory, the study could be conceived of as two separate activity systems operating concurrently, whilst sharing elements of the model such as the wider community, operational rules, the division of labour, and even the outcome. It should be noted, however, that a crucial element which was not shared, was a common object. Instead, it was discovered, once the project had started, that the ecosystems found in the lower slopes of the two mountain ranges had evolved quite differently over time – one being semi-rural while the other suburban, respectively – and this limited the potential for the identification of common bases for comparison and analysis.
In the geographical study described in the present thesis, the activity system engaged with by the participants is conceived such that subjects do share a common object, namely the physical and human features in the neighbourhoods (such as reservoirs, quarries, and public housing tower blocks), the spatial and socio-economic relations of which were elucidated upon – into a fuller perspective of understanding the neighbourhood geographically – through participation in the wayfinding and debating (through the Structured Academic Controversy) activities which constituted the intervention.
In drawing this discussion on applications of activity theory to digitally networked learning environments to a close, it would be helpful to consider how activity theory informs the interactions which take place using handheld technologies. For example, Soloway (2003) has written a program ‘Cooties’, which is billed as a virus-transfer simulation. In this program, students (Grade Three and up) work collaboratively to deduce the origin of a ‘virus’ from handheld to handheld, based on an investigation of factors such as incubation time, dissemination pattern, immunity levels and so on. These factors are designed to model factors of real-life disease transmission, such as polio, HIV and Ebola. Through an analysis of the pattern of dissemination of the virus as the simulation is run, Soloway contends that students engage in hypothesis testing and experimental design.
‘Cooties’ distinguishes itself from the few other programs written specifically for handheld-device use in K-12 education, in that it seeks to take advantage of the particular affordances of the technology – in this case the simulation of the unobtrusive and unmediated transfer of bits of data within an existing social group, based on predefined parameters of interaction, over space and time. Both ‘Cooties’ and the next project to be described – Moed’s (2002) ‘Annotate Space’ – can be conceptualized in terms of classical activity theory, in that they involve a group of subjects (representative of a wider community) whose interactions with a set of objects (situated in either real or virtual environments) are mediated through tools such as Palm handhelds.
In fact, Moed’s innovative use of the limited internet capabilities of more recent handhelds to explore the nexus of ‘real’ urban environments with the socially-annotated virtual world, embodies the very nature of ‘just-in-time, just-in-place’ social interaction that my research focused on. Known as ‘Annotate Space: an interpretation and storytelling on location’, it is at its most basic a contemporary take on traditional walking tours, with the very important exception that the commentaries en route are not solely those of a faceless authority on the locale, but are instead the combined contributions from fellow tourists and residents. The story which is told is therefore an evolutionary palimpsest of all who have gone before, and one to which the visitor himself is invited to add. Storytelling is arguably mankind’s oldest artform, and the Annotate Space project embodies many of the defining characteristics of social software, in this case by taking the form of a handheld-friendly website consisting of what Moed terms ‘content pages’ and ‘support / activity pages’.
Moed’s project represents an attempt to extend traditional ‘walking tour’ services, such as HandHeld History (which has started in Covent Garden in London using mobile phones), and the second being PDATours (which provided narrated guides to places of scenic beauty and cultural heritage in Singapore, using both handhelds and mobile phones). Both HandHeld History and PDATours, however, lack true client-side interactivity afforded by the annotations feature which so characterizes Annotate Space. The nature of the interaction in HandHeld History and PDATours, therefore follows a more classical server-push model.
Most recently, investigators from the University of Queensland and Charles Darwin University (Axup, Bidwell and Viller, 2004) designed and conducted an activity which had as its objective that one group of subjects to communicate a given route to another group. Three participants each had to decide upon, and photograph waypoints on, a 360-metre route within a twenty-five hectare university campus. A maximum of ten photographs for each route were then selected and inserted into photo albums, which were then given to four other participants. This intervention is fairly similar in some ways to the orienteering portion of the present study, with the primary exception that, with respect to the Australian design, the orienteering was done asynchronously and with the use of printed photographs, as opposed to synchronously using mobile telephony to communicate digitally-rendered photographs from handheld to handheld.
Messaging and other forms of networked access afforded by handheld technology are relatively recent phenomena, with accessibility of authorship of applications for the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) only becoming available since 2000 or so, following the establishment of the WAP Forum in 1997 by Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia inter alia. This relative novelty, combined with the fact that K-12 education, as a whole, tends not to be an early-adoptive industry with regards technology, has meant that there is a dearth of literature dedicated to the study of how the mobile internet and its related technologies can be used in educational contexts.
Academic research has instead tended to focus on the use of the related technology of instant messaging, of which studies by Lam (2004) – on how the social networking afforded by instant messaging has contributed to identity formation amongst first-generation immigrants to the United States – and Lewis and Fabos (2005) – on how literacy practices used by adolescents during instant messaging might be applied to school settings – are typical.
A few initiatives, however, are worthy of mention at this juncture. Three pioneering studies have attempted to investigate the impact of the mobile internet on school-children. In Singapore, Lim et al (2002) looked at the opportunities and limitations of WAP to mediate online discussions in learning communities. In Finland, Kasesniemi and Rautiainen (2002) focused on the role which text messaging plays in the lives of Finnish teens. Third, Skog (2002), in the same volume, explored the relationship between the Norwegian teen’s sense of identity, gender and class, vis-à-vis the usage of the handphone.
With regards the two Scandinavian studies, Kasesniemi and Rautiainen (2002) were interested in the nature of the text messages sent by adolescents to each other. Working as part of the Information Society Research Centre, University of Tampere, Finland, they reported that in 1998, the number of text messages sent by adolescents exceeded the number of calls made. Their study involved participant observation and the interviewing of nearly a thousand Finnish children, youths and adults. It focused specifically on three so-called ‘cultural practices’ of Finnish adolescents, namely message collecting, chain message circulating, and collective reading and composing.
Kasesniemi and Rautiainen found that message collecting – the copying of significant messages into diaries or notebooks – was predominant among adolescent girls more than boys. Further, while boys “tend to write only about what has happened, where and how it has happened”, girls (especially when messaging other girls) “contemplate the reasons behind incidents and include descriptions of how the matter has affected them... their language is nuanced and meandering”. When girls message boys, however, they “say they must write in ‘plain language’ without too many compressed expressions, references and suggestions”.
Frissen (1995) has noted similar differences in telephone usage between the sexes. For instance, Frissen has commented that “women use the phone mainly to make relational calls” whereas for men “the functional uses dominate”.
Such a gender difference is not evident in the circulation of chain messages, the content of which often had to do with alcohol, sex or cigarettes. Instead, it was found that “the most active chain message enthusiasts are 13 – 15 year olds... older teens claim to be bored with chain messages”. As for the cultural practice of collective reading and composing of messages, the authors elaborated that this took place to the extent that certain expressions, or even entire messages, were incorporated in the composition process; conversely, they note that “lovers often indicate trust by allowing each other to read their messages”. Such collaborative behaviour among adolescents stands in sharp contrast to the more usual (and private) way in which mobile communication is depicted in the media. Kasesniemi and Rautiainen summarize by reminding us that “the mobile phone and SMS are not the primary motivation for SMS use. The most significant factor in teen text messaging culture is the content of the messages.”
Skog, analyzing data primarily from Grade Nine students from seventy schools in Norway, adds the surprisingly counter-intuitive finding that youth from middle-income families seem to have an ideological resistance to the adoption of the handphone, when compared to their working-class schoolmates. Norwegian girls also display a disproportionately high adoption rate for these devices. In fact, 75% of the girls in the study expressed sending text messages as an important motive for using a mobile phone, compared to 62% of boys. Skog summarizes his findings first by asserting that the mobile phone is “not a type of technology associated with muscle, manual skill, or all-male environments... girls have acquired competence and knowledge of the type of technology that the mobile phone represents”; and second by concluding that Norwegian teens who own mobile phones have a general technological interest and competence, whereas non-owners display a more traditional school-oriented competence.
The degree of market penetration of mobile devices in Singapore has been high. It has risen from eighty percent of residents in Singapore in 2003, to ninety-one percent a year later (InfoComm Development Authority of Singapore, 2004). Just over half of these subscribers send at least one text message a day, and the five top usages of wireless applications, in descending order of popularity, were text-messaging, downloading ring tones, participating in donations, checking information, and playing games.
There is clearly much interest in mobile telephony and the mobile internet in Singapore. Further evidence, if such were needed, can be found in the ‘mobile clubs’ which have been set up in some local schools, with the help of the InfoComm Development Authority of Singapore. The first of these clubs was set up in early 2004 in Victoria Junior College, with the aim of helping students develop software for the mobile platform, with training and infrastructure provided by a third-party vendor. One of the first such applications developed was to enable students to vote securely via their mobile phones during school events such as student council elections.
In his study on twenty postgraduate teacher-trainees in Singapore, Lim (2002) designed two types of learning tasks around an online learning environment, which comprised a traditional web-based knowledge management system together with a WAP-based discussion forum. The learning tasks involved so-called brainstorming discussions and case-study discussions respectively. From his analysis of how the subjects in this activity interacted with each other using the various digital tools available, Lim concluded that “topics that allow students to exchange and reflect upon their own personal experiences tend to draw higher participation during online discussion”. He also emphasized the complementary nature that WAP can and does play with regards to the more familiar worldwide web, as well as the role of a tutor-figure in mediating discussions within the online ZPD.
To conclude, this chapter has outlined the basic tenets – cultural artifacts, language, and the Zone of Proximal Development – of Vygotskyian cultural-historical activity theory, and how it has been extended and adapted to inform understandings of contemporary digitally-mediated learning environments. The following chapter will elaborate on each of these tenets, with regards the present intervention described in this thesis.
Thus, some of the secondary artifacts (Wartofsky, 1979) include the sketch maps and messaging exchanges produced by the participants during the field task; while the main tertiary artifact would be the participants’ enriched understandings about the respective issues, as represented by their debates and PowerPoint presentations. The role of language is analyzed through the multimodal messaging exchanges, both in terms of the use (and misuse) of spatial frames of reference and of a proprietary scheme of task frames and scaffolds. Finally, these same exchanges will be evidence of the importance of the ZPD to the successful outcome of the field tasks, through peer coaching, scaffolding and guided participation.
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