EIAH, le mots de la recherche (suite)

Ainsi que je l'ai annoncé dans un billet précédent, le 13 octobre, dans le cadre du projet EducMap (PEPS CNRS), Luc Trouche et Olivier Rey ont organisé à l'IFé (ENS de Lyon) le second séminaire "pour une cartographie dynamique des recherches en éducation". J'ai présenté le méta-projet TEL Thesaurus, ses objectifs, sa structure et son état actuel. Je ne sais si cela aura une suite, mais la qualité des échanges de cette journée laisse quelques espoirs.
Par ailleurs, la récente labellisation par l'ANR du projet de réseau de recherche Orphée offre de bonnes perspectives d'avancer significativement la constitution du thésaurus et du dictionnaire des termes de la recherche en EIAH (en anglais, lire TEL voire EdTech).
Je compte que la discussion s'engage rapidement et que des chercheurs intéressés se manifestent pour contribuer à cet effort.

 

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EIAH, les mots de la recherche

Le 13 octobre 2014, dans le cadre du projet EducMap (PEPS CNRS), Luc Trouche et Olivier Rey organisent à l'IFé (ENS de Lyon) le second séminaire "pour une cartographie dynamique des recherches en éducation". Je présenterai à cette occasion le méta-projet TEL Thesaurus, notamment pour la partie concernant les termes et expressions de la recherche en EIAH ; les lignes ci-dessous en résume les objectifs :

La recherche sur les EIAH couvre un large champ de problèmes en étroite interaction depuis la conception jusqu’au déploiement. De nombreuses disciplines sont impliquées. Leur diversité entraine celle des discours et des pratiques scientifiques en particulier lorsque sont soulevées les questions sur la nature des résultats, leur validité et leur légitimité. Les malentendus sont nombreux et les approximations courantes. L’entente est souvent locale et provisoire, à l’occasion d’un projet ou d’un congrès, et rend difficile la constitution d'un corps de connaissances stable. Pour dépasser cette difficulté, nous avons choisi une approche pragmatique en partant des mots du discours pour en faire l’inventaire et poser la question de leurs définitions. Il ne s’agit pas d'imposer une vision unique, mais d'explorer la richesse lexicale du domaine et d’établir, par ce moyen, des relations entre disciplines et traditions scientifiques. Ce dernier point est particulièrement important. S’il est vrai que la recherche sur les EIAH est internationale et que son vocabulaire est le plus souvent forgé par la sphère anglo-saxonne, il n’en reste pas moins que la plupart des chercheurs travaillent d'abord dans la langue de leur institution et pensent encore -- pour beaucoup d’entre eux -- dans leur langue maternelle. La question de la traduction ou de l’interprétation des termes se pose et peut faire apparaître plus que des nuances.

La construction d’un thésaurus de la recherche sur les EIAH a donc été engagée pour répondre au double besoin de consolider la communication entre chercheurs de différentes disciplines et locuteurs des diverses langues. Je présenterai au cours du séminaire la procédure adoptée pour constituer le thésaurus, le dictionnaire et la stratégie éditoriale. La conclusion évoquera les leçons que l'on peut retenir, et proposera des perspectives de développement du projet.

A decade after, what is left from Kaleidoscope?

Ten years ago, on March 2004 the 9th, we held the kick-off meeting of Kaleidoscope, a FP6 network of excellence, in the Castle of Sassenage, near Grenoble. A great day for a great ambition. The network initially gathered 76 research teams in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), what meant about 850 researchers and PhD students ; by the end of the EC contract we were about an hundred research teams associated in some way, and more than a thousands researchers and PdD students.

The aim of Kaleidoscope was to foster integration of different research disciplines relevant to TEL, bridging educational, cognitive and social sciences, and emerging technologies. To bring this ambition to reality, in a very fragmented European TEL research area, we chosen to involve a large number of contributors of which only a small number were already collaborating, and a large range of different research themes. Hence a very high level challenge. A set of instruments (focussed joint projects, virtual doctoral school, common platform, etc.) was planned to support the integration process at both the content and the infrastructure level (cf. the technical annex of the project [here], and the slides of the general presentation at the kick-off meeting [there]).

In my opinion, situated at equal distance from success and failure, Kaleidoscope was both a human and a scientific venture. Writing a report on the lessons learned with Sten Ludvigsen, scientific director of the network during the last period of the contract, we noted that "the history of these four years is that of the construction of the network in interaction with a process for understanding what to be a Network of Excellence means, and what integration means in the TEL research area. It is also the history of the interactions between the consortium and the reviewers team and the project officers."

Interestingly, this difference in the views about Kaleidoscope may be illustrated with a certain sense of humour by this picture. Above the head of Jens Christensen, our founding project officer, the portrait of Gaspar Baron de Sassenage, above myself the image of a character taking off supported by angels in a blue sky... Ten years after the character has landed. He is back with ideas still ambitious but probably better shaped by experience and a certain sense of pragmatism which he learned in particular in an other TEL network of excellence from the FP7, STELLAR. Some outcomes of this joint academic venture are still there, as the TeLearn Open archive, the TEL dictionary, and the largely disseminated book synthesizing the Kaleidoscope scientific legacy. TELEARC, the association which has taken the challenge of keeping alive and building on Kaleidoscope legacy has organised a new Alpine Rendez-vous conference in collaboration with STELLAR, and may organize an other one. But all this does not really account for what the Kaleidoscope network has changed in the TEL research area, to understand this change the best data we could have is that from your own view and experience, hence the question:

As a participant in the Kaleidoscope network of excellence, either contractor or associated, what in your opinion can be considered as a legacy? What is left or what you miss when looking back to what we did?

You can respond by leaving a commentary on this post. If there are enough comments, I will make a synthesis of your views and publish it on this blog (let's say in a month or two) and possibly find a way to share it with the project officers and the reviewers who have looked after us during these years.

Science 2.0, is it a new practice or the leveraged version of an old one?

Retrieved from a post of  Nicolas Balacheff on the SOA scientific portal on September the 25th, 2009

Since the beginning of its history, Scientific research has been a social activity with a large place given to communication, debates and collaborations. There are many evidences of this social dimension of the scientific activity, including famous and extensive exchanges of letters. The development of the publishing industry and business has leveraged the capacity of disseminating research results, questions and debates. The impact of IT-based tools has accelerated the phenomena, but has not changed its meaning and scientific raison d'être. The main revolution is in the capacity nowadays to not only share theories and results, but also instruments and data at a point never experienced before. This is the core of Science 2.0, as emphasised by Barbara Kieslinger and  Stefanie Lindstaedt in an analysis of Science 2.0 practices, it means in our field "the possibility for researchers to share lab results, protocols, class activities, etc." (p.2). We fully agree.

But there is one point worth to discuss. The authors mention (p.1) the effort invested in "publishing one's ideas". The word "idea" deserves some attention. The scientific activity, in my opinion, is less about sharing ideas than agreeing on results which could be turned into shareable knowledge shareable. What means that the issue is to discuss the rational and the argumentation (if not proof) supporting the claimed results. Sharing ideas leads to an over emphasis on social interactions and concern about ownership, sharing results would call for paying more attention to the data, the theories and the methods we use and down play the issue of ownership (which actually can never be avoided, e.g. polemics about anteriority). If sharing and publishing ideas is our core business, then I understand those who fear theft (plagiarism) and vandalism. If we privilege the sharing of results then the risk is less important, but the challenge more difficult to take up because it means some consensus on the theoretical frameworks and the related methods. Indeed, I mean results coming from work advanced enough so that it makes sense to share it (and not unfinished work, see p.2 sec. 3.).

The discussion on TEL Science 2.0 is actually a discussion about our scientific practice (whatever is the technology): What do we publish? What does it mean to publish "ideas" and "unfinished" (and sometimes not started) projects? Data cannot be published without being documented, here what can we say, then what are the conditions for sharing data in our domain?

In the end the problem is less to open up our research, than demonstrating by reaching reasonable theoretical and technological consensus that it produces something tangible, and not only discourse. The risk of Science 2.0 is exactly that: increasing and accelerating the production of discourses at the price of forgetting the production of high quality results and developing the TEL knowledge base.

A note after the reading of: Kieslinger B., Stefanie N. Lindstaedt S. N. (2009) Science 2.0 Practices in the Field of Technology Enhanced Learning. In: Science2.0 for TEL Workshop. ECTEL, Nice, France

The TEL Dictionary initiative at the MEI spring school

Jointly held with the first Medical Education Informatics (MEI2012) conference, the Medical Education Content Sharing Technologies Spring School included in its programme a presentation of the TEL Dictionary initiative. The following slide-show introduced the project, then participants were invited to react and comment (see the report here).

Questions from the MEI2012 Spring school about the TEL Dictionary initiative

About 20 PhDs and senior researchers from different disciplines participed in the TEL Dictionary session of the Medical Education Content Sharing Technologies Spring School held  Thessaloniki on April 5th. After a short presentation of the TEL dictionary initiative, participants were invited to scan the current lists of terms and expressions included in the TEL Thesaurus, in order to make remarks and suggestions and express their own priority. Here are the results and some comments.

Participants express their wish to see in the list terms and expressions from disciplines which provide TEL research with important concepts. Here they are: Connectionism, Connectivism, Case based learning, Community of practice, Active learning, Interactive learning, Worked examples, Digital literacy. They are from the learning science. Only one term from computer science was suggested: Intelligent agents. What may be emphasized is that there are no terms specific to TEL research, but terms pointing to concepts and theories from education and psychology that researchers need. So here is the needed extension for the next release of the thesaurus.

Four expressions from the thesaurus were pointed as deserving priority: Distributed learning, Game-based learning, Ubiquitous learning, Collaborative learning. This corresponds well to one of the prominent stream of communication of the MEI 2012 conference: internet as the place were to content is shared and learning communities are emerging.

Then, three questions:

Why is "constructionism" in the thesaurus and not "constructivism"?
Both terms are used as keywords to tag paper in the TeLearn open archive, hence both could have been in the first version of the thesaurus. However, "constructivism" is one of the big concepts in psychology,  for which it is rather easy to find well documented definitions. Since the strategy is to develop the thesaurus in an incremental way, this term has not been included at the first stage. "Constructionism" is a term which has been coined by S. Papert as a response within the Logo framework to the limitation found in referring only to "Constructivism" (one of the foundational reference of Logo). This is then a term specifically introduced in TEL research, and hence we took it (see the definition prepared by Richard Noss).

Why is "Virtual campus" in the thesaurus? It seems to be a direct translation of a French expression (campus virtuel) and not a genuine English keyword.  
It is right that "campus virtuel" is a keyword in the French TEL research area. However, "virtual campus" is an entry of wikipedia where it is defined as "the online offerings of a college or university where college work is completed either partially or wholly online, often with the assistance of the teacher, professor, or teaching assistant." A quick look at Scholar shows that this expression is rather popular internationally and for quite a long while. As suggested by the participant, there is also the expression "Digital campus", which looks rather close and possibly more English. But may be we have to be cautious with such feelings and to take the time to come back to the literature to check the claim against evidences. 

One should notice that "teaching" is not in the thesaurus, why?
To some extend we can consider as a curious fact that the word "teaching" is not present. There is the word "tutor", what suggest that teaching is not completely foreign to the TEL research area, as it were. But it is right that the word is not in the set of keywords from which we started -- those of TeLearn repository and also a questionnaire to the community. One reason may be that the focus on learning and the learned tended to push aside teaching if not the teacher. And this is reflected in the keywords chosen by researchers, even if they use the word in their writings. Another reason  may be that in English there is some "teaching" in the meaning of learning (as it is the case in French where you can say "les élèves apprennent l'anglais", but also "j'apprends l'anglais à mes élèves"...

What would make a social software a science 2.0 tool?

Retrieved from a post of  Nicolas Balacheff on the SOA scientific portal on September the 25th, 2009

Moving "away from managing generic individual networks to managing contextual shared spaces", Graaasp seems to be a smart tool to shape a learning community, be it in TEL or in an other domain. If I understand well, its key characteristic is the richness of the support to social interactions on top of content, the proactive support to establishing links and the dynamic of the roles within the community.

Reading a scenario of use of Graaasp, I wondered what would be the specific added value of this environment for a researcher in TEL. I came to thinking that it is not its versatility in resonance with a young domain which rapidly change, move, evolve. It is not its openness to the variety of disciplines and competences in a multidisciplinary domain. It might be its capacity to dynamically create a common knowledge base as a side effect, if I may say so, of the creation of trusted community and working groups. Indeed, there are other domains which are young, not well established and multidisciplinary. But I wonder whether there are other domains in which there is so little agreement on the theoretical and methodological frameworks, uncertainty on what is known and accepted, reluctance to build a common knowledge base -- if not sometimes a serious doubt about he fact that there can be "results" in a scientific sense in TEL.

We know how to build FAQ from the analysis of a flow of questions and answers, can we build a knowledge base from the analysis of the queries of the students and the feedback and support from knowledgeable others -- supervisors, senior researchers or peers? Would Graaasp be instrumental in doing that? If so, I would see it as a fully Science 2.0 infrastructure, what is more than being a software supporting the construction and shaping a community from a social perspective.

A note after the reading of: Gillet D., El Helou S., Joubert M., Sutherland R. (2009) Science 2.0: Supporting a Doctoral Community of Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning using Social Software. Science2.0 for TEL Workshop. EC-TEL

Could designed-based research become the TEL research standard?

Retrieved from Nicolas Balacheff  (2010) comments on papers available on the SOA scientific portal

Design-based research is a rather interesting framework for TEL research project,which although not new (the seminal papers go back to the early 90s) does not seem to have deserved all the attention it should in the European research area. Taking as an indicator the references of the EduTech wiki from TECFA (*), one may conjecture that it reached us in the early 2000, but since then I have not the feeling that it has spread very much within our research community. I don't see clear reasons for that. In my opinion we must spend some efforts, especially in a network like Stellar to consider this approach. From the presentation of Wang and Hannafin (ETR&D 53/4 2005), design-based research seems to be especially adapted to multidisciplinary research as well as to research which must be carried out in close connection to the field it explores. It may be the case that some researchers think that they are working in this paradigm while actually they do not, since there are at least two occasions of misunderstanding. The first source of misunderstanding is the emphasis of design-based research on iteration, an emphasis which is reminiscent of the life cycle of technology design. But here iteration is not only aiming at the improvement of the design, but also at critically revisiting theories to develop or refine them. What is valued is the practical use of theories (p.13), and the fact that theoretical and practical issues are tightly related. The second source of misunderstanding is that because of its close relationship to the field, design-based research may be confounded with action-research. This is missing the priority of design-based research, while acknowledging its situatedness, to transcend the particularities of the context in which the experiment is been carried out. This difficulty is very well identified in this paper, and addresses directly the main concern of our field which is of understanding what results we produce which could be of a general value beyond the specific project in which it has been obtained: "Generalizability […] must be verified according to the theory goals of the design and discipline requirements of the research. Researchers need to optimize a local design without decreasing its generalizability […]" (p.19). So design-based research is not a sophisticated conceptualisation of the life cycle of a technology, it is of a different nature and objective than action-research. To some extend it can be seen as a proposal for a new discipline with original problems of methods and rigour.

There is one point on which this paper passes a bit too fast. It is the meaning of "real", what could count as "real-word context". Any experiment or observation carried out in a classroom changes what it is as opposed to its normal functioning. This is well-known but  as a common sense fact and scientifically not enough documented. The authors acknowledge the complexity of reality, but do not catch the need to model it in an explicit way (with all the constraints of something which is out of reach of an exhaustive description, indeed). Any experimental science is faced to this need including natural science. The place where an experiment is carried out is an experimental apparatus, it has to be described as such even if it is embedded in a so called real context. (it means a context which is largely out of control but if which many features have no impact). This is a condition to be later on able to discriminate between generalizable results and "idiosyncratic" (p.19) adaptations or observations, and to sort out which of the data are relevant for further analysis. This dimension of design-research may well be the missing element to succeed in becoming the scientific standard it is ambitions.

Blog post based on the reading of: Wang F., Hannafin M.J. (2005) Design-based research and technology-enhanced learning environments.  Educational Technology Research and Development 53 (4) 5-23, DOI: 10.1007/BF02504682

Teaching counts

  Retrieved from the TEL opinion blog, December the 22th, 2005

The reasons why the learner, either a child or an adult, needs "teaching inputs" are very often hidden as a corollary of the emphasis on—and possibly the misunderstanding of—the constructivist principles of design of learning environments. I would like to suggest here that these needs are especially important in the case of modern environments which are largely distributed and provide a potential access to a huge amount of knowledge and information. The following questions illustrate some of the issues that learners may have to face when left on their own in the wild web of digital resources: "How to look for something you don't know? ", "How to know that what you have found is what you were looking for? ", "How to know that you have learned?". Here are some of the issues that a teaching assistant should help to address. Another crucial question is: "How will others know that you know?"

It is not enough that learners have solved problems for them to understand that they have learned. Creative problem-solving which is at the core of the constructivist approach is so rich in new intellectual constructs that it is even a problem for the learner to realise what is worth remembering. Here again is a specific task for a teaching assistant. There is no general teaching model which could be implemented to equip a learning environment with the corresponding functionalities.

The nature of complex knowledge (as opposed to basic skills) is another reason to seriously refocus the design of learning environments on teaching issues. One of the main characteristics of such knowledge is, first that to master it requires to master several different pieces of knowledge organised in the form of a system, and second that its use depends on methods which are not mere algorithms. Such knowledge cannot be constructed spontaneously even when learners are provided with an adequate problem-situation, and actually in some cases such situations are even still unknown (e.g. linear algebra). As a result, complex knowledge requires specific learning environments and content specific teaching strategies. The complexity of such knowledge also comes from the fact that the corresponding learners' conceptions (i.e. learners' cognitive constructs), can be very different the one from the other and rather complex to understand and to model. The current research on students' understanding of the concept of "function" in mathematics or of the concept of "energy" in physics witnesses this complexity. The development of technological tools aiming at supporting the use of these knowledge (formal computation, simulation, etc.) even increases the difficulty by modifying within a kind of systemic loop the nature of the users' conceptions.

We cannot expect one single universal agent to be able to handle the complexity of supporting the learning process in the case of complex knowledge. On the contrary, there is a need for specialised agents, either artificial or human, able to cooperate and to coordinate their actions in order to provide the best support to the learner—indeed, one could remark at this point that the situation might not be so different for the so called "basic skills"…

My claim is that: the educating function of a system is an emerging property of the interactions organised between its components, and not a functionality of one of its parts.

The fascination of research

Retrieved from the TEL opinion blog, December the 17th, 2005

The word “Research” evokes the fascination of knowledge as well as the expectation of the mastery of the unknown. Research outcomes are expected to be innovative by nature and reliable by construction. Everything works as if being based on research, actions and decisions should be less risky than being based on any other grounds; namely, opinions and beliefs. Indeed, “opinion” is an intellectual category hazardous and anything but reliable, while “belief” is as contingent as opinion with the worse characteristic that facing failures it does not leave room for much revision.

The strength of research results lies in their justification, ruled argumentation (proof) or systematic empirical evidence, and their accessibility to revision under the pressure of refutation. Research results have the epistemic characteristic of knowledge; they are products of a human activity which transcend the historical and anecdotal context marking their origin. However, from a scientific perspective, a piece of knowledge is not a statement, but the complex “object” shaped by the relations between a statement, a proof and a theory—all framed by an accepted problématique that informs about the relevance of a question. The return of investment in research is the reliability, universality and openness of its outcomes, its cost is theory, proofs and dealing with refutations. This has two meanings: (i) research is not about the so called “reality”, but phenomena identified through the lenses of a problématique; (ii) the dialectic of proofs and refutation is not empirical but of a theoretical nature, possibly addressing not a result but its rationale or even its underlying problématique.

Nothing new there, but something to bring back to the fore when we question the role and the contribution of research to the development of TEL. Something which has been forgotten (or lost) with the emergence of “acadustry”!