Chapter 9: AFTERWORDS
In this Chapter, I shall not attempt a comprehensive review of the
various themes that have arisen in what has gone before. I hope the
summary sections associated with each individual chapter achieve this
purpose well enough. Instead, I wish to extract a small number of
issues that I think recur throughout this book and make some closing
remarks in relation to them.
Of course, the book has been concerned with computers and education.
But that is a broad topic, and my own interests around it may appear
to be rather particular. Certainly, I have not attempted an overview
of all the various ways in which computers can now enter into
curricula. Their influence has become so far-reaching that such a
task would be too ambitious. In fact, some of the educational
software employed in my own observations may seem rather
modes illustrations of what computers can offer - these examples may
not reflect a state-of-the-art by which some enthusiasts might prefer
the technology was judged. However, my interest has not been to
describe these frontiers; my real starting point has been a concern
with the broad character of educational experience. Observations of
learners working at computers have furnished a helpful opportunity for
developing this interest. In some respects it has been useful that
the tasks observed have *not* been too sophisticated. This should not
imply that my interest in computer-based activities has been entirely
a contrivance. In the end, I believe that this technology does offer
a special potential for enhancing the experience of learning. I shall
return to stress this point towards the end of this Chapter.
Before going further, I should restate and reinforce the perspective
on educational practice that I have promoted throughout this book. In
Chapter 3, I suggested that many psychologists approach questions of
learning equipped with one of two pervasive metaphors: computation or
construction. These are broadly associated with, resepctively, the
academic traditions of cognitive science and of cognitive
developmental theory. My own preference has been to foreground a
third conception: collaboration. This I derived in Chapter 2 from the
socio-cultural theorising inspired by Vygotsky and his contemporaries.
For many developmental psychologists, this theorising has been
effective in drawing attention to the socially-grounded nature of
cognition. In part, that has stimulated attention to processes of
social interaction, as they relate to cognitive change. Yet, I feel
the empirical orientation towards this topic has been over-attentive
to ideas arising from the scaffolding metaphor - as it is often
used to describe the interpersonal dimension of instruction.
Socio-cultural research could gain from developing a greater concern
for the nature and management of intersubjectivity. I have argued
that a socially-grounded perspective on learning must acknowledge a
human capacity for projective understanding of mental states in
others. It is this that creates a deep human concern for the
formation of socially-shared cognition. Finally, I have argued that
such a concern is at the core of what is entailed in collaborating.
On the experience of collaborating
I have suggested that psychological research into collaborative
learning has made only modest progress. It has been dominated by a
preference for analysing collaborative exchanges by coding and
counting discrete social acts - usually utterances. There is some
value in such categorising systems but they fail to characterise the
sustained and discursive nature of many collaborative encounters.
Firstly, these encounters have a temporal dimension: they involve
partners in a protracted constructive process. Secondly, they involve
a commitment to coordinating action and attention in relation to some
focal point existing between collaborators. In fact, these two
features of collaborative interactions are related. Often, what it is
that is constructed in this protracted fashion is what can become an
"object" of shared knowledge; this then serves to focus or direct the
coordinated action.
The important point is that collaboration should be recognised as a
state of social engagement that, on any given occasion, is more or
less active and more or less effectively resourced. So, collaborators
may vary in their concern to create shared understandings; and their
circumstances of joint activity may vary in how readily they permit
such achievements to be brought off. The challenge is to discover how
discourse is mobilised in the service of creating joint reference; to
see how what is created gets used as a platform for further
exploration; and to see how the material conditions of problem solving
can be more or less friendly towards efforts after this mutuality.
In Chapter 7, I characterised children talking in ways that were
variously successful in achieving shared knowledge, and I described
computer-based problems that were variously successful in supporting
them attempt to do this. Within those accounts, I also suggested that
participating individuals might enjoy very different experiences of
this collaborative effort. This notion was prompted by recognising
that some children could claim a different degree of investment or
ownership in the shared knowledge that underpinned the joint activity.
However, the same reasoning raises a question about collaborations
that are successful in this respect: can they claim a particularly
*positive* affective tone. This notion is entertained in Argyle's
discussion of cooperation: 'One possibility is that the experience of
closely synchronised interaction is intrinsically rewarding, the
result of evolutionary pressures favouring cooperation' (Argyle, 1991,
p. 10). Unfortunately, Argyle only pursues this idea in relation to
bodily synchronisation - such as we might enjoy during dancing.
Yet, the pleasure of being 'sychronised' may extend beyond the case
of physical coordination. Our own casual experience of being
collaborators surely endorses the idea that being in posession of
shared knowledge (and being conscious of its mutual nature) can be a
positive experience. Perhaps this is all the more so, the greater our
awareness of an interpersonal investment lying behind its
accumulation: this may impart to the possession of shared knowledge a
certain agreeable intimacy. In fact, this affective dimension may
touch on something very basic in human nature. Trevarthan comments:
'But only humans have the kind of appetite a one-year old begins to
show for sharing the arbitrary use of tools, places, manners and
experiences' (Trevarthan, 1988, p. 55). This appetite we might chose
to read as a precocious expression of the motive for shared reference.
Furth and Kane's (1992) discussion of the social creation of mental
(narrative) objects seems to make a similary point for the preschool
child.
These observations of very early manifestations of collaborative
interactions introduce the second of my closing themes.
On becoming collaborative learners
I am stressing the central place of socially-shared knowledge in
learning; and, thereby, the central place of collaborative
relationships within which such knowledge gets constructed. Yet, this
emphasis may seem in some tension with classroom realities. In
particular, ethnographies of classroom life tend to suggest that
peer-based collaboration can be very difficult for young children to
sustain (cf. the review in Chapter 6). Moreover, researchers who have
discussed with young children their experience of academic
collaboration tend to find that many pupils do not regard those
experiences very positively (Cullingford, 1991; Galton, 1990). This
might raise in our minds a question around which there is a long
history of speculation and reasearch (reviewed by Pepitone, 1980):
namely, are we basically cooperative or collaborative creatures? Our
attitude to this issue may colour our enthusiasm for organising
collaborative circumstances for learning.
Certainly, various anthropologists have argued that we have a
fundamentally cooperative nature (Hall, 1976; Trivers, 1983).
Moreover, the research of developmental psychologists might suggest
that there is indeed something basic in ourselves that is relevant to
this issue (a "basic-ness" that may or may not demand reference to
evolutionary arguments). I have in mind the basic capacity and
motivation to exercise an intersubjectivity. In fact, Trevarthan
regards interpersonal motives as 'the primary organisers of mental
growth' (1987, p.178). He describes a developmental course whereby
infants first manifest a primary intersubjectivity - they achieve a
harmony of affect and emotion with others. Then they move towards a
secondary intersubjectivity - they manifest concern to establish with
others shared reference towards external objects and circumstances.
Moreover, casual observation does suggest that the achievement of this
shared reference is a visible source of considerable pleasure for
infants.
Other researchers have traced this concern into the preschool years.
Toddlers may be particularly interested in objects that are seen to be
within the attentional span of a play partner (Eckerman, Whatley and
McGhee, 1979; Eckerman and Stein, 1982; Hay, 1979). Budwig, Strage
and Bamberg (1986) report a (rare) longitudinal study of these
processes as they transform from parent-dominated encounters to
encounters of shared reference with age-mates. They make the point
that parents make a distinctive contribution to these encounters.
They naturally work hard to create and sustain shared objects of
reference and this leads to a peculiarly rich platform from which new
learning and exploration can be supported.
On the other hand, Dunn's (1988) research on preschool sibling
relations suggest a sometimes less harmonious atmosphere within
playful family arenas. Hay, Caplan, Castle and Stimson (1991) have
observed the fracturing of collaborative attitudes among young peers:
they argue that maturity does bring a concern with personalised
interests, particularly in conditions of jointly acting in relation to
scarce resources. Of course, it is not clear that we should regard
such developments as symptomatic of some basic human striving for
individual gratification - in conflict with collaborative motives.
Again anthropological research is valuable in drawing attention to how
changing conditions of living re-direct basic human motives. Graves
and Graves (1986) review a rich variety of such changing conditions
relevant to the developing sense of self and community. To express it
starkly in their terms: new economic and social orders make it less
necssary to 'store food in the neighbours belly' (Graves and Graves,
1986).
It is important to see the technologies and rituals of modern
schooling as part of this cultural influence on development. The
infants' concern for shared reference in relation to material objects
may continue to feature in collaborative situations; they may reliably
recur through the remainder of life. But this secondary
intersubjectivity must also become elaborated in new ways with the
growth of a more symbolically-dominated intelligence. Children will
explore new forms of mutual knowledge that are more representational
in nature. In particular, shared reference may become increasingly
located in narrative structures. For during the preschool years,
children will naturally explore a variety mutual of involvements
with narrative (cf. Furth and Kane, 1992). Schooling may further
mobilise such playful collaborations; but it also puts a new kind of
demand on collaborators. They must come to generate shared objects of
understanding that are abstract, but which can not readily take on
a narrative format: they must, for example, collaborate about
mathematics and language itself. These are the classroom
circumstances where joint work is observed to flounder (Bennett,
1991). As the terms of the task become more complex in this way, so
the social interaction may be observed to disintegrate into parallel
and solitary forms of work (Perlmutter, Behrend, Kuo and Muller,
1989).
On resourcing collaborative encounters
The above remarks imply one way of looking at the problems and
possibilities of school-based collaborations. Such a perspective
seeks to understand how schooled tasks create special demands upon
collaborators. Thus, ait would be argued, consideration needs to be
given to how these demands can be resourced. The formation of joint
understandings is a natural and visible achievement of children
functioning in out-of-school contexts: the challenge is to discover
how those achievements can be mobilised for realising purposes defined
in classrooms.
This is not a traditional psychological orientation to the problem of
making collaborative learning happen. More typically, psychologists
might approach this problem in terms of a skill model: so it might be
suggested that school children could benefit from some form of
training in being collaborators (cf. Johnson, Johnson and Roy, 1984).
Alternatively, it might be suggested that collaborative learning is
assimilated to a developmental sequence - arguing it can only occur
following the stage-like emergence of various cognitive structures
(Tomasello et al, in press). I prefer to start from the insight that
children are collaborators from a very young age. Certainly, before
they get into schools they are already highly competent at forming
shared reference - and highly interested in doing so. What is needed
is a greater sensitivity to how continuities can be forged between the
successes of collaborating in domestic and playful contexts and the
demands for doing so in schools. Of course, preschool children's
capabilities for coordinating activity with others is a particular
kind of achievement: it will be dominated by shared reference that is
located in material or narrative structures. So, perhaps the trick
will be to appropriate and extend these achievements into schooled
life.
Computers offer considerable promise in this respect. They can
furnish flexible representations that may become the objects of joint
reference for learners. This capability reflects their interactivity
and their sophistication as a general symbol manipulating technology.
Theorists who adopt a Constructionist (Harel and Papert, 1991)
perspective on computers in education dwell on these properties. Such
theorists are keen to highlight the capacity of computers to make
learning experiences concrete. Yet the orientation of the influential
constructionist tradition has been very much towards the needs of
self-contained learners. So, in a paper discussing what is understood
by making knowledge "concrete" through computers, Wilenski remarks:
'The constructionist paradigm by encouraging the externalization of
knowledge, promotes seeing it as a distinct other with which we can
come into meaningful relationship' (Wilenski, 1991, p.202). In
considering the place of computers within collaboration, I have
stressed their capability for creating such externalised resources.
But the 'meaningful relationships' thereby afforded need not be simply
those between the individual learner and some knowledge domain. They
may also be relationships held in common with others and creative
collaborations may be especially enhanced by that possibility.
In Chapter 7, I described tinkering with a computer program
(one that supported early number work) in order that it might furnish
such a referential anchor for pupils using it together. This
tinkering was successful, in that pupils' activity became increasingly
coordinated around this point of shared reference: they collaborated
more effectively. Developing technology to be supportive of the
collaborative experience of learning is partly about developing
such ways of resourccing joint activity *at* the site of some problem.
But in other chapters, I have stressed that the collaborative
experience extends beyond this famililar paradigm. So it will be
important to understand the assimilation of computers into these
broader engagements. For one thing, this means being alert to the
danger that computer-based activity may fail to get drawn into the
community of discourse that characterises organised learning. The
collaborative interactions of teachers and pupils need to be organised
*in relation to* computers - just as they are to all class-based
learning experience (Chapter 5). In addition, there are other senses
in which the collaborative experience of learning is organised. In
Chapter 8, I considered how communities of learners may collaborate in
a more loosely-coupled way *around* a resource - collaborating
'through the air'. It will be helpful to understand more of how the
technology can be integrated into a learning environment to take best
advantage of opportunities for social exchange. Finally, I have
discussed (Chapter 8) collaborations that may be experienced *through*
this technology.
On the prospects for computers within collaborations
In this book, I have promoted a particular theoretical perspective on
how we might best organise teaching and learning. This has involved
foregrounding the collaborative experience of being a pupil. It has
involved attending to how organised learning invariably is about the
construction and deployment of shared understandings. As participants
in this endeavour, we may proceed more or less effectively, and we may
be resourced to do so more or less imaginatively. My interest in
educational technology is very much for its supporting role in this
sense. I have tried to review something of the exisiting social
structures of educational practice and to suggest some of the ways
that computers may enter into them to support what people are
attempting together. This has involved arguments about the *general*
way in which technology is deployed: not more focussed considerations
of the value of particular computer-based applications - tutoring
systems, simulations, tools, or whatever. My attitude towards any
such particular application is very much determined by how effectively
it is being incorporated into the participatory strucutre of learning
(including consideration of how readily its design might afford such
incorporation).
These concerns are worth rehearsing. There is currently much
enthusiasm for educational software exploiting the new multimedia
presentation capabilities of microcomputers. Certainly, if this book
had attempted to review computers in education in terms of their
technical sophistication and creative ingenuity, then it would have
been necessary to have discussed these applications at some length.
But in terms of the agenda that I have set here, it is not clear that
these new developments are especially promising: it is not clear that
they are going to resource a socially-grounded experience of education
as I have been discussing this. Indeed, accounts of new practice
based upon, for instance, hypermedia tools suggest that these are very
much tools conceived for isolated learners. Landow's (1990) work is
an excetion to this. A recent article by Lehrer (1993) is also
exceptional in evaluating a hypermedia resource in terms of its
relation to the background culture of educational practice into which
it is placed. Perhaps it should be hoped that this signals a new
research trend among developers of this challenging technology.
Another area of fast technical development is networking tools and
connectivity. Yet, as reviewed in Chapter 8, it is not obvious that
the potential of networking is being realised in educational practice.
Universities may be the best settings in which to show what is
possible here. However, the signs that it will offer such a model are
not encouraging. For example, the UK government's support for
developing computer-based teaching resources in higher education has
been quite generous. Yet, none of the many individual projects
financed so far have focused on communication structures, and very few
of them pay any explicit attention to the support of collaborative
learning.
I believe the prospects are not particularly encouraging for an IT
development strategy that respects the social themes I have been
considering. If anything, the climate is drifting towards
"delivery-system" models of computers in education. This allows
politically influential commentators to see new electronic media as a
technology for 'capturing the worlds' best brain power' such that it
may 'dramatically increase the rate of circulation of intellectual
capital' (Hague, 1991) This commodity approach to education is
increasingly visible. One recent advertisment for a British
university invites potential students to put it 'at the top of their
shopping list': this institution's concerns being illustrated by a
supermarket basket filled with packages labelled "ecology",
"genetics", "modern art" and so on. Some of the arguments developed
here in Chapter 3 may help us see how computers could be effective in
supporting such delivery of packaged knowledge.
All new technology in education is inherently vulnerable to
deployment in this way. Thus, it is important to remain vigilant to
trends as they are developing. My own advocacy of networks (Chapter
8) should probably have been more sensitive to the potential of this
infrastructure to support the delivery model of education. For
example, there is now a network-based academic journal called the
'On-line Journal of Distance Education'. It has many interesting
articles on Distance teaching. However, its masthead carries a
sobering prediction:
In the industrial age, we go to school, in the information age, school
can come to us. This is the message implicit in the media and
movement of distance education.
This message may be part of the vision shared by many innovators and
many politicians. There may be good grounds for contemplating more
innovative structures of organised education than those that are
currently exemplified in western schooling. But I hope that whatever
alternatives evolve they will respect the need for learners to
participate within rich communities of understanding: to partake of
the collaborative experience of learning.