One postulate, three refutations: a discussion on CSCL design

Retrieved from the TEL opinion blog, August the 22th, 2006  

Pierre Dillenbourg, in his contribution to the book on “Barriers and biases in computer-mediated knowledge communication ”did choose an interesting angle to address design issues in CSCL research. The idea is to organise the discussion in the form of the confrontation of a postulate to possible refutations. Actually, this misses a point that a postulate has not to be refuted, but to be accepted, rejected or replaced (it is in this way that you open the way to non-Euclidean geometry). But, it does not matter, what is gained from the organisation of the discussion is much more interesting that this nuance, and eventually it does not prevent the emergence of an alternative postulate which could open the way to a new research agenda. From this perspective I would claim that this text worth to read for our PhD students.
 

The postulate discussed states that “the more a system would be able to reproduce face-to-face interaction features, the better it would be?”. What is sometimes shortened into the richer the interface, the better. The refutations presented by Dillenbourg (the commercial failure of WAP compared to the great success of SMS communication, the limitation of the added value of video communication) evidence that enhancing computer-mediated communication (CMC) is not a guaranty of either a better adoption by users or of a greater efficiency, but more interesting it suggests that CMC has it own specificity.
 

Here is the new key idea, the new postulate!, to keep from Dillenbourg contribution:

“The purpose of CMC tools is not to perform better than face-to face interactions but to augment social interactions (in the sense of augmented reality)”

Three examples of CMC specificities are presented to demonstrate that “computer-mediated communication is definitely less rich than face to face interaction but also possesses interesting feature worth exploring.” Dillenbourg team projects provide an illustration of these feature which are: persistency, context reification and mirroring the group activity. Interestingly, it is emphasised that these features should not be considered as productive enhancement per se: “what augmentation means is of course specific to each task: what facilitates one task may not be useful for another.” However, it is difficult to see what is here specific to learning. So, let’s investigate this apparent absence of our common problématique.
 

We are interested in activities which can stimulate, support and validate learning. Even if in they could look like working or entertainment activities, learning activities require still some specific features which come from the fact that performing them is not enough if there is not the acknowledgement in some form of the related learning outcome. This means that a learning activity is not “known” until we know the “learning what’. To go straight to the point: a learning activity is always content specific because the type of interactions (actions and feedback) needed depend on the type of knowing targeted. 

Then Dillenbourg is right, our research agenda should be “to determine which interactions are desired and how they can be induced by the interface”. But to carry out such a programme, I don’t agree that “the main bottleneck here is our imagination”, in my opinion the main obstacle is our lack of knowledge of the best conditions for the learning of a content be it academic or practical, elementary or complex.

Pierre Dillenbourg : Designing biases that augment socio-cognitive interactions. In: Reiner Bromme, Friedrich W. Hesse and Hans Spada (eds.) Barriers and biases in computer-mediated knowledge communication (pp. 243-261). Berlin: Springer.

PS: about the imitation bias, I would be very happy if you could have a look at the ornithoptère video:

To make it short: if would be great if we could imitate good teachers, but it proves to be extremely difficult. So it may be better to search for another way, however this does not mean that this one is wrong, silly or irrelevant. An other point (indeed the Dillenbourg point) is that ICT could allow us to explore other avenues, epistemologically more relevant. This is a challenge which is interesting in itself and not as an alternative to an imitation that we are not able to afford.