In search for the authenticity of learning situations

Retrieved from the TEL opinion blog, January the 4th, 2007
 

 "WallCology" is a neologism coined by Moher's team to designate "a ubiquitous computing application [...] which situates a virtual ecosystem within the unseen space of classroom walls" (p.163). Actually, this technology blows the boundaries of the screen, and even of the internet; it invade the "real" world, following the design principles of embedded phenomena project which I introduced in a post some times ago. From a content perspective:

"WallCology situates students within a complex virtual ecosystem, where they may conduct investigations focusing on topics such as the identification and classification of species, habitat selection, population estimation, food chains, predator-prey relationship, life cycle phases, adaptation and response to environmental change" (p.164)

Then learners are exposed to a field of experience which hybrids the "real" and the "artificial" worlds. It is not an augmented reality, nor a virtual reality, but a new world which holds key characteristics of the world we are familiar with: persistent, tangible, immersive. Phenomena are simulated, and the simulation is -- I may say -- seamlessly embedded in the learner physical environment. The underlying vision is of offering learners the experience of contemporary science inquiry (i.e. "collaboration of researchers from multiple distributed sites working around research questions associated with a common phenomenon" -- p.165). However, the project does not propose only a technology but a comprehensive environment in which learners have to cooperate, organise their work and also to learn how to behave in order to make experiments and observations possible: The WallCology "creatures" are designed to behave in such a way that "students must learn to approach the observation points quietly, and to consider the reaction to noise as a component of their behavioral description" (p.167).

Designed with "the desire to problematize inquiry", WallColgy includes a lot of the characteristics to facilitate a "move closer to authentic physicality" (p.166). However, Moher's team suspected limits in this choice. I don't mean only technical limits but what we may call epistemic limits. For example, they decided to use imaginary creatures instead of "authentic" ones in order not to frighten young children and to avoid stereotyping the living conditions of some learners.

This consideration points a question rarely addressed: what means "authenticity"? Once one has said that there will always be a distance between the real world and any of its representation, what can we add? Is authenticity an issue of the same nature for entertainment, expert planning (architecture, surgery, etc) or learning and training?

The environment has been implemented in two classrooms, respectively for seventh and third grade learners. The article report on these experiences is contrasted. On the one hand there are clear indications that learners played the game and their behaviors provided "tentative evidence of the effectiveness of the feature in promoting authentic inquiry practices" (p.169). Learners were genuinely committed to the problem induced by the situation and the WallCology context, they caught the complexity of the task and invented strategies, new research questions and structured their cooperation (distribution of roles). Many positive cognitive outcomes are then reported, but their progress was more at what I may call an instrumental level; at a more conceptual (so to say) level the progress is more limited. As Moher and his colleagues report it: learners (esp. Seventh grade) "did not show improvements on pre-post items related to the use of behavior as a cue to species identification" (p.170), or "none were able to give strong characterization of [the tag-recapture method] conceptual motivation" (p.170). Indeed, the authors have noticed that "the design of instruction and the design of technology proceed in parallel, mutually informed by curricular goals, classroom practice, and advances in technology" (p.171). But noticing this is not enough. So to say, the report of the project about students achievements resemble the reports of students about the bugs behaviors: there should be now a step towards a more substantial conceptualisation. If I dare a parallel, a psychological model of the bugs might not help the learners, but a model of the bugs interactions with their environment is surely the stake. Then:

what about a model of the [learners<->WallCology] system, or may be more generally what about a [subject<->milieu] system from a learning perspective?

Moher, T. (2008). WallCology: Designing interaction affordances for learner engagement in authentic science inquiry. CHI 2008 Proceedings - Learner support (April 5-10, 2008 - Florence Italy) - pp.163-172.

When the space is the interface

  Retrieved from the TEL opinion blog, April the 12th, 2008
 

Making accessible phenomena by means of simulations is one of the added values of computer-based learning environments. To make it simple, let's say that the key feature of simulations is to have a good mathematical model plugged on an efficient visualisation of the  targeted phenomena. However, such simulations are processed within the limited space of the screen of the computer over a short period of time. The development of virtual reality and the so-called full scale simulations allow the access to spaces beyond the limits of the screen. However, one is still immerged in an artificial world with time and persistence  constraints (notably, this is not the case in MMOs). The idea of embedded phenomena coined by Tom Moher opens smart ways to overcome several of these limitations.  An embedded phenomenon  is the emergent property of  the behaviours of a set of "distributed media located around the classroom representing 'portals' into [the] phenomenon depicting local state information corresponding to [its mapping onto the physical space of the classroom]." The space of the class becomes the interface with the model which has been implemented; but it is more than that since a simulation can run  "continuously over weeks and months, creating information channels that are temporally and physically interleaved with, but asynchronous with respect to, the regular flow of instruction."  This approach opens new significant possibilities for the simulation of phenomena where space and time count. Migration of  bugs, movement of the planets or earthquake find with embedded phenomena a much more relevant framework to challenge learner modelling, requiring an effective conceptualisation of space and time.   

But  the essential contribution may be not  at the level of the acquisition of the concepts themselves but at the level of the acquisition of the methodology and the organisation of the scientific work. Students have to organise the space and the time to collect data, then gather and analyse what they have obtained individually to build a collective knowledge. Given the role of time, the experiment cannot be replicated at will. Close to what happen with on the field studies , observations have to be planed, showing may be more accurately the relation between observation and theory.    Moher emphasises the positive effect of his approach, its "affective impact" (more emotional interest in the phenomena) and its impact of productive social interactions. And indeed one must recognise that  this smart idea provides students with an unprecedented experience. However, there is not much conceptual analysis, and it is difficult to assess how far this will be manageable and robust enough under the classical practical constraints in school. It is said at the beginning of the paper that "the [embedded phenomena] framework does not prescribe an instructional design per se, not does it provide any direct scaffolding to support learning", but few lines later it is claimed that "phenomena are made accessible and responsive to the needs of learners through the novel uses of classroom time and space". How are needs of the students, specifications of the environment and orchestration required from the teacher taken into account in the design and the implementation of embedded phenomena? There is inherently a simplification in the design of this framework and, at the same time, a complexification of the teaching and learning context. How far does this count? How does it impact the learning outcome? And the teaching task? Embedded phenomena have a huge learning and teaching potential, but it also opens the way to quite difficult and stimulating research questions. No doubt that we will be eager to discuss these with Tom Moher when he comes to the Learning science conference next summer in Utrecht . Moher, T. (2006). Embedded Phenomena: Supporting Science Learning with Classroom-sized Distributed Simulations. Proceedings ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2006) (April 2006, Montreal, Canada), 691-700. (Best Paper award)