Teaching, an emergent property of learning environments (1)

Retrieved from Nicolas Balacheff (1999) notes for the EU/US conference, Stuttgart

The trend of research in educational technology, during the last decade, has been to focus on learners and learning. The evolution of the ideas could be sketched in the following way : the initial paradigm was to design Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) as autonomous machines with strong instructional functionalities and some sort of modelling of learners' needs and cognitive characteristics, a second paradigm has been the development of learning environments (eg microworlds) opening to the learner a real space for the exploration and the construction of knowledge. The former has not led to clear success, the later has evidenced serious difficulties (well documented by the Logo literature) and the need to complement the environment by teachers input and guidance. The lesson then, is that if teaching reduced to instruction is not the more successful avenue, the absence of teaching features in a learning environment does not guaranty either the quality of the learning output.

What are the lessons ? Clearly the need to search for a new paradigm which could ensure a better equilibrium between learning and teaching, between human and machines. The common interest of Europe and the US, either in general education or professional training (lifelong learning), to overcome educational difficulties especially in science, mathematics and language learning, together with their common recognition of the potentialities of educational technology, should lead to a fruitful synergy in this area.

The reasons why the learner, either a child or an adult, needs "teaching inputs" are very often hidden as a result of the strength of the emphasis on the constructivist principles of design of learning environments. These needs are especially important with modern environments which are largely distributed and provide a potential access to a huge range of knowledge and information. These reasons could be sketched by the following questions which acknowledge that the learner has in general a low level of control on the events which are on the edge of the learning process in which he or she is involved—unlike the expert problem-solver:

"How to look for something you don't know? "
"How to know that you have found what you looked for? "
"How to know that you have learned?"

A last question raises a crucial question related to the fact that in many cases learning is related to a willing to get the adequate qualification with respect to a given competence or activity. Indeed, the issue of certification must be considered together with the design of a learning environment, since…

"How will others know that you know?"

These issues, which call for the involvement of teaching (agents) in the learning environment, are even more essential in the case of complex knowledge (as opposed to basic skills).

Education, éducation and bildung... far out of reach

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

"Science Education” or “Mathematics education” are not expressions easy to translate in French; we would prefer to speak of “apprentissage des sciences” ou “apprentissage des mathématiques”, or alternatively of “enseignement des sciences” or “enseignement des mathématiques” but we have the “éducation physique” which has recently been renamed “Activités physiques et sportives” (APS) after the emergence of the “Sciences et technologies des activités physiques et sportives” (STAPS) as an academic domain. Still we have the “éducation civique” which aims at educating the learner as a citizen, with as an alternative the “instruction civique” which seems more like teaching than educating. This quick sketch of the linguistic context in which we have to communicate, demonstrate that the word “education” is a difficult one, which seems not to translate well in English when we compare the French use of the word with the English use which seems to be a bit larger.

I suspect that the same happens with the German word “bildung”—a word even more complex than “éducation” if one considers the 10 pages it deserves in the “Vocabulaire Européen des philosophies”. I will not here try to summarize the “bildung” section of this dictionnary, but just notice that its connotation is much closer to culture and civilisation, although indeed it is far from being a synonymous of any of them. The distance between “bildung” and “das lernen” or “das unterrichten” appears to be larger than between “education”, “learning” and “teaching” .Indeed, this raises a serious question when translating “Artificial Intelligence and Education” and using AI-ED as a key word in our domain. Not to mention all the key words using the word “education” or one of its versions.

However, John Self acknowledges a difficulty of the same nature, when writing that:

“If a field is to call itself ‘AI in Education’, then it seems necessary for it to say what it considers ‘education’ to be. However, despite its name, AI-ED has never been concerned with education in its broad sense but only with the specific issue of learning. We may believe that the whole purpose of education is to promote learning but in reality the process of education includes many activities only indirectly related to learning, as any textbook or conference on ‘education’ will confirm. 

The term ‘education’ is generally taken to mean ‘formal education’, that is ‘paid-for education’, rather than the ‘informal education’ we receive for free from our culture’. There is a nostalgic preference for the latter, with the former being considered to stunt individual learning capabilities. These polemic views will not be our concern. We will be concerned only with the nature and effectiveness of the learning processes.” (Self 1995, p.6)

The best decision may well be to avoid “education” as a key word, or part of a key word in our metadata. Indeed with one exception: AIED… 

Self J. (1995) Computational mathetics: towards a science of learning system design . November 1995 draft version (available online at that time, sometimes refered to as Technical Report 96/23, Computer Based Learning Unit, University Leeds) Cassin B. (ed.) (2004) Vocabulaire Européen des philosophies . Paris: Seuil & Le Robert

Learning, not so far from teaching

Retrieved from the TEL opinion blog, November the 18th, 2006
 

We have all experienced difficulties in translating our papers and talks into English, and some of our English colleagues have taken up the same challenge when preparing their communication in an other language. The difficulty is classical: translation is not a mere transduction, words from two different languages rarely match: beyond the definition there is the connotations induced by the context or shaped by the history and the culture. This is not only a problem when translating our papers and talks, it is also a problem when establishing an ontology or metadata from an international perspective. This is especially a problem for research on TEL because most of our work does not develop in a formalised framework: the meaning of our words is not stable or fixed, even for recent neologism like e-learning (or elearning, or eLearning…).

I take here a first example from among all the problems we had to solve with Lucile Vadcard and few Kaleidoscope colleagues when building the metadata for the description of the documents to be uploaded on the TeLearn open archive that Kaleidoscope recently launched. This first example is “learning”. Indeed, “learning” is a word which is at the core of our discourse, and essential to any of our theoretical or practical activities. Here are a few of the expressions one could consider, they are taken from what is often proposed as keywords by conferences or journals: collaborative learning, ambient learning environment, learning environment, augmented learning environment, blended learning, distance learning, learning object, learning grid, situated learning, tangible learning, etc. When translating in French, it is clear that a “learning environment” is not “un environnement qui apprend” but “un environnement pour apprendre”, or to make it provocative: “un environnement qui enseigne”. This is more evident with the expression “blended learning” which is difficult to translate in a simple manner, it could mean “apprentissage mixte” (as suggested by Wikipedia) but this misses that eventually it refer to a teaching strategy which makes the best benefit of different possibilities, either digital or not, to stimulate and support learning. Again, we see that there is some “teaching” in the meaning of “learning”. It is very likely that the source of our difficulty is there. It is possibly why some of our colleagues decided not to define the expression “mobile learning ”!

Invited to participate in the workshop eAgenda, I had to consider the question: “can we introduce learning in every human activity?” One may understand now why, at first, this question embarrassed me. To elaborate a comment, I thought interesting to come back to the origin of “learning” and “teaching” in the English language. Both English words, “learning” and “teaching”,  has a German origin, tracing back respectively to "læran ” and “tæcan ” in Old English. While the latter meant “to show” or “to persuade”, the former was preferred to mean “to teach” or “to guide”. Then, could we suggest that the English word learning has a teaching connotation, and that as a result the meaning of  the question is: “can we introduce læran in every human activity?” In other words: can we empower every environment with “teaching” capabilities.

Indeed, such a discussion goes beyond a problem of translation. It raises the problem of understanding what is our field about. In my opinion, it is about “technology for human learning.” In this expression “learning” point more specifically the human epistemological challenge, passing to the small word “for” the burden of the teaching connotation. Moreover, it translate well in French: “technologies pour l’apprentissage humain”!

If you are interested by continuing this discussion, and not only reacting to this blog,  just click here

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.

Ambient learning

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

"Ambient learning", in the TEL context, comes in general as part of expressions like "Ambient learning environment" (eg Gomez and al. 2004) or "Ambient learning technologies" (e.g. Lonsdale and Vavoula 2004). It refers to "devices and systems that enable active, responsive environments that play a part in the learning process". The expression is reminiscent of "ambient intelligence", an ICT conceptual construct referring to "devices [which] work in concert to support people in carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals in easy, natural way using information and intelligence that is hidden in the network connecting these devices" (Wikipedia ). Moreover, "As these devices grow smaller, more connected and more integrated into our environment, the technology disappears into our surroundings until only the user interface remains perceivable by users." (ibid.).  Richard Noss in the late 80s coined the expression "ambient learning culture", but the connotation seems to be different. The quotation and its textual context is:

It should be clear that the computer is being cast in a rather special relationship to the learning process, not simply as another concrete embodiment of an abstract mathematical concept. As Dörfler (1986) argues, the distinction between concrete and abstract is artificial in any case, since it presupposes that there exists an a priori union of actions and operations which is fractured in the course of learning. The key idea is that of focusing attention on the important relationships involved, a role in which [...] the computer is rather well cast; but not without the conscious intervention of educators, and the careful development of an ambient learning culture." (Noss 1988 p.263).

By "ambient learning culture" Noss means that one, in such a culture, would engage in learning in any occasion, everywhere, at any time; while in "ambient learning environment", it is the environment which is supposed to stimulate and support learning; an environment which might be naturally tutoring... Again, for the non-native English speaker, there may be some teaching in this meaning of learning. Then, how to translate that correctly in other languages than English? and, more important, what is the conceptual rational of this expression?

  Dorfler, W.: 1986, 'The cognitive distance between material actions and mathematical operations', in Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp.141-146). London Gomes A., Mendes A.-J., Marcelino M.J. (2004)  Avaliação e evolução de um ambiente de suporte à aprendizagem de programação. Actas do VII Congresso Ibero-Americano de Informática Educativa, Monterrey, México, Outubro de 2004   Lonsdale P., Vavoula G. (2004) Research into current technology that could be applied to the design of learning spaces. Report prepared for JISC project eSpaces   Noss R. (1988) The computer has a cultural influence in mathematical learning (pp. 251-268) in Bishop A. (ed.) Mathematics education and culture. Dordrecht: Kluwer pub.

Retrieved from the TEL opinion blog, October the 15th, 2006 

GRID technology is a more and more important field of investigation in computer-science. It could be seen as the digital implementation of the old proverb “l’union fait la force” (unity makes strength), by its way of using distributed computing resources to make a kind of super computing device. Indeed, there are many problems to solve to ensure the reliable and efficient cooperation between machines having different pieces of a computing task, their solution requires the convergence of theoretical frameworks from parallel, distributed and high performance computing. Taking up the challenge of GRID technology is strategic. A proactive policy does now support the progress in this domain.

 As is often the case, the emergence of a new advance on the technology front stimulates a new exploration on the front of educational technology. This is the old technology push story, which in my opinion is not wrong as long as it is not driven by a digital mirage. The recently edited book “Towards the learning GRID ” is a good occasion to learn where we are with this domain and what is the vision of its potential for TEL. The authors, among which several key participants of the Kaleidoscope Learning GRID SIG , set the scene in a very relevant way: “previous projects that have set out to improve learning through novel technologies have often failed to leave any significant mark because they did not give priority to the social, economic and technical perspectives of the key human factors” (p.63). So the learning GRID venture for which the ultimate goal is to ensure “the possibility to personalise the learning processes according to the learners’ preference and style” (p.74), will not be replicating errors we made in the past.

 Following the leaders of the ELeGI European project our colleagues from CRMPA and DIIMA , the added value of the GRID approach is to give a framework to realise the effective sharing of heterogeneous resources based on the concepts of service, distributed collaboration, and virtual organisation (p.66). A characteristic of GRID technology, they remark, is that it is not based on a mere protocol communication among the resources, but on message communication among services; This remark suggests that the resources could engage conversational interactions about what is requested and what is responded. This means a kind of intelligence that, if it were to exist, must be based on an understanding of the learning/cognitive and pedagogical/didactical requirements. But at this point we may be disappointed by reading the authors suggestion that “an innovative aspect is that our general model is the presence of three models: Knowledge Model, Student Model and Didactic Model, which substantially interact among them to define the specific and personalised formative path” (p.73). Of course, I think that they are not coming back to the seminal ITS trilogy. So, where does that leave us?

In a fully distributed world (wide web) these models should be distributed as possible features of the resources. Moreover, they will be explicitly or implicitly tangled (e.g. a knowledge model for a learning environment de facto include an epistemic and a didactical model—the latter being at least that of a didactical transposition). Then, I would suggest that:

The didactical nature of a GRID for human learning is an emergent property of the resources it gives access to and the interaction it supports, and not the property of one of the components

This resonates well with the “learning ambient intelligent vision of the learning domain” on which these authors conclude their contribution (p.74). Then we may choose to consider teaching as an emergent property of a system instead of one of its dedicated functions. This view may invite us not to consider GRID technology as an end, but as “[the] technology for building the next generation of learning environments” (p.182):

“Through the adoption of [GRID technologies], we can have a wide-scale learning resource sharing in heterogeneous and geographically distributed environments, the implementation of learning organizations in which different actors (universities, teachers, learners), sharing a common target, are able to cooperate to achieve a result” (p.183)

Let’s add that the actors could be artificial as well as human, and we get the picture of a hybrid world driven by the learners’ needs. Eventually, this is a picture that we could have drawn with the modern multi-agents technology. So what is the specific added value of the GRID approach? It is claimed that it is a solution to fulfil educational specifications that we all share nowadays, but still this solution is presented in rather general terms. We are almost sent back to the initial question but from a slightly different perspective: what are the problems relevant for GRID research when raised from a learning perspective? What are they, not in general educational terms, but in computer-science terms?

These comments are based on the following chapters taken from Ritrovato P., Allison C., Cerri S.A., Dimitrakos T., Gaeta M.  and Salerno S. (eds. (2005) Towards the Learning Grid Advances in Human Learning Services (Frontiers in artificial intelligence and application series, volume 127). Amsterdam: IOS Press.

Gaeta M., Ritrovato P. , Salerno S. (2005) Making e-Learning a service oriented utility: The European learning GRID infrastructure Project. (pp.63-78) Capuano N. , Gaeta A., Laria G., Orciulli F., Ritrovato P. (2005) How to use GRID technology for building the next generation learning environments. (pp.182-191) Lemoisson P., Cerri S. , Sallantin J. (2005) Conversational interactions among rational agents. (pp.214-230)