A didactical view on authenticity

Retrieved from the TEL opinion blog, August the 27th, 2008

The search for authenticity of learning situations is a concern for most designers of TEL environments. Most of them realise soon that this is a desperate project since any environment is a representation of some kind of a reference, often called "reality", which keeps staying at a distance. To be as close as possible to reality does not mean much, unless we can qualify or quantify the closeness. Indeed, this is a challenge and we are not be well equipped today to take it up. A solution might be to find a theoretical framework within which we can formulate the problem, and then search for a solution within this framework. This first step will put limits on this solution, but it will make it much more tangible and so accessible to further progress. Currently we too much lack definitions and references to ensure that we can seriously discuss the issue. But, let's try something...

 First, we may agree that a learning environment becomes such if it is embedded in a situation which can contextualise the learner activity and hopefully stimulate, support and validate his or her successful learning. Be they formal or informal, these situations have an objective which can be made explicit in learning terms at least from the point of view of their designers; the fact that this objective is explicit for learners is another story. Following Brousseau(*), let's call "didactical" these situations. Didactical situations can be distinguished from other situations by their explicit intention to "teach". And here is the problem! As soon as the learner identifies this intention and bases on it his or her activity, it is very likely that the learning outcome will not have the expected "authenticity". All the search for authenticity of learning situations (and learning environments) is dedicated to the overcoming of this difficulty.

Second, let's consider the limit case of a didactical situation which didactical intention is completely transparent. If learning occurs in such a situation, we could ascertain that its outcome has the expected "authenticity": it does not owe the didactical intention (in other words the reasons for the activity of the learners are in the knowledge at stake not due to any guessing of the teacher or trainer expectations) These are "adidactical" situations, let's quote Brousseau:

"[The student must know that] this knowledge is entirely justified by the internal logic of the situation and that she can construct it without appealing to didactical reasoning. Not only can she do it, but she must do it because she will have truly acquired this knowledge only when she is able to put it to use by herself in situtations which she will come across outside any teaching context and in the absence of any intentional direction. Such situation is called an adidactical situation. Each item of knowledge can be characterized by a (or some) adidactical situation(s) which preserve(s) meaning; we shall call this a fundamental situation." (Brousseau p.30)

These three concepts: didactical situation, adidactical situation and fundamental situation will allow us to locate our problem of authenticity, and to formulate it.

So, designing an authentic learning situation depends on our capacity to characterize the related fundamental situation in relation to the piece of knowledge which learning is at stake. The problem is then not the closeness to reality, but the fact that the situation has the epistemic properties specific to this piece of knowledge. The specification of a so-called authentic environment requires first the expression of these epistemic properties and of the way they can be "translated" in the tangible world. However, once we have such a situation, there may be still a long way to designing an adidactical situation likely to be made available to learners. The design of this adidactical situation and the related environment is the challenge of designers of authentic TEL environments. After that, there is still one issue for the teacher: bring to life this adidactical situation in the classroom without damaging its "authenticity", what is the didactical challenge!

A quick example to conclude this post: the concept of "angle" in mathematics finds its full meaning when linear measurement is not possible or too "expensive" (for example when sailing on the Atlantic). Let say that the fundamental situation for "angle" is the problem of locating a point in the macro-space. We can realize that the classroom can hardly host a macro-space, we have then to find a situation which has the characteristics of the macrospace (linear measurement being impossible or too "expensive") and can be implemented in a classroom. If the problem were presented in the frame of a piece of paper (micro-space), the situation may appear quite artificial in the students eyes (a ruler is enough), then the corresponding didactical situation would be delicate to negotiate and in the end fragile. Technology can offer a solution, opening the window of the computer on the macro-space...

Brousseau G. (1997) Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics . Springer (Kluwer Acad. Pub.)

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.