The Practical Power of Theoretically-informed Research into Innovation

Bridget Somekh, Manchester Metropolitan University

My presentation will draw on the first three chapters of my book, Pedagogy and Learning with ICT: Researching the Art of Innovation (Routledge, 2007), and recent research at MMU into the use of Interactive Whiteboards in primary classrooms. I will start with the proposition that research into ICT in education is, in our time, always research into innovation, and therefore needs to be grounded in theoretical knowledge about the process of innovation. Drawing on a range of theories that shed light on the nature of social practices, identity formation and human activity systems, I will suggest that we need a new way of conceptualising the process of innovation with technologies. This will include discussion of how best we might understand the notion of a technology’s affordances, and the ways in which technologies potential for mediating human activity is socio-culturally constructed by ‘the rules of the game,’ what Wittgenstein calls ‘learning how to go on.’ Drawing on chaos theory and complexity theory, I will suggest that change with technology is ubiquitous and largely out of the control of authorities / organisational structures. Yet, the role of educational research must be to understand how the power of technology can be ‘nudged and nurtured’ by shaping the context in which learning is situated, so that it can transform the capabilities of children and teachers. In conclusion I will suggest that to inform policy and practice in ICT in education we need a methodology which integrates research with development, because we need knowledge about how the process of change itself shapes practice. Research which attempts to measure the impact of an ICT innovatory initiative, without intervening to change the factors which enable or constrain its implementation in order to understand them, cannot inform the development of policy and practice. Moreover, such research can never be valid, because it cannot provide evidence of exactly what was being measured: such research at best provides knowledge of the impact of a partially implemented initiative, and at worst of an initiative which when implemented bears little relation to its original aims and vision.

Kristiina Kumpulainen

University of Helsinki and University of Warwick

Major national and global initiatives have been proposed in different parts of the world to consider the impact of technology on learning and education.

In addition to demonstrating the outcomes of learning with technology, many reports stress the need to increase understanding of the ways in which people learn with and from technology in and across various social and cultural spaces. While in the past it may have been adequate to research technology-mediated learning exclusively from the perspective of artificial intelligence or from the view point of cognitive psychology, it seems less likely today. We are all learning within the research community that the field is becoming much more complex, dynamic and intertwined. Technological innovations are providing learners and educators with new tools, spaces and possibilities for learning. New social technologies provide exciting possibilities for communal knowledge creation, changing the traditional ways of thinking about knowledge, its creation and ownership. Moreover, technologies provide learners new ways of collaborating, interacting and making oneself present during the learning activities. These innovations also draw attention to the identity work of learners in the social spaces of technology. My talk explores the possibilities offered by the sociocultural framework embedded in sociolinguistic and ethnographic analyses of interaction and learning to the research of the social practices of learning in technology-enriched classrooms. In drawing on some of my empirical research studies, I shall illuminate what this conceptual framework allows us to (re)search and see.

From Learning Environments and Implementation to Activity Systems and Expansive Learning

Yrjö Engeström

The implementation of technologically advanced computer-supported learning environments in educational practices is notoriously difficult. As Larry Cuban has repeatedly shown, instructional technologies, in particular computer tools for learning, are oversold and underused (Cuban, 1986, 2001). It is not an exaggeration to say that most of the research and development on digital learning environments leads to prototypes and isolated demonstration-type implementations at best. I will argue that efforts at improving implementation may be largely misguided to begin with. It may be more fruitful to frame the issue in terms of expansive learning in collective activity systems, including schools and other educational institutions.

To concretize these two conceptual shifts (from learning environments to activity systems, and from implementation to expansive learning), I will present a case analysis based on data from the Jakomäki middle school in Helsinki, Finland, where my research group conducted two cycles of intervention studies, in the school years 1998-99 and 2000-01 (see Engeström, Engeström & Suntio, 2002.