Andreas Lund

Wikis: A collective approach to language production

Wikis represent a particular type of collaborative learning environment where collaboration can result in aggregated, collective products. This study makes the claim that such potential challenges language production practices in school where the individual learners output is often the focus of attention. The argument is put forth by juxtaposing theory, literature review, and videotaped wiki activities. Wikis are examined in a sociocultural perspective, in particular the notions of collective zones of proximal development and sociogenesis – that we come to knowledge by taking part in activities where individuals relate to a greater collective that evolves over time and where language and material artifacts function as structural resources. A review of some recent research in CALL and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) seeks to form a backdrop for this study of collective language production. Empirically the argument is illustrated and supported by selected videotape transcripts of learner interactions involving the use of a wiki in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. The study shows that learners work in and across activity types that create tensions between individual and collective, institutional and novel practices, but that the wiki also holds the potential for collective knowledge advancement and language development.

Is there a space for the teacher in a WIKI

In this paper we ask to what extent collective cognition can be supported and sustained in classroom practices. One major challenge for learning in technology-rich, collaborative environments is to develop design principles that balance learner exploration with a more goal directed effort. We argue that teachers play a key role in such efforts and that educational wiki designs need to allow such a role in order to support group knowing. First, from an activity theoretical perspective we discuss teaching in knowledge collectives as new type of educational activity. Next, we analyze functions and meta level affordances found in the MediaWiki application. This is followed by a presentation of an intervention study in which the MediaWiki was used by a class of Upper Secondary School learners in Norway. Findings are used to discuss design principles for wikis that support collective cognition and where there is a place for the teacher.

The right tool for the wrong task? Match and mismatch between first and second stimulus in double stimulation

Using Vygotsky’s notion of double stimulation as an analytical tool, we discuss the complex relationship between tasks, tools, and agency in CSCL environments. Empirically we examine how learners in a Norwegian senior high school class learning English as a foreign language approach and respond to an open-ended and collectively oriented task using a wiki. Our findings show that collectively oriented knowledge and language production takes place locally in small groups as well as in the larger collective of the class, and that learners find it difficult to maintain awareness of both levels of activity. However, when facing a breakdown in the wiki application, learners sustained strategies that carried many of the characteristics of collective production. We argue that there is a need to further theorize the task-tool relationship in activities involving collective knowledge production and that we need to align pedagogical as well as technological designs in order to give support for such efforts.

The multiple contexts of online language teaching

The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss some communicative opportunities currently emerging in networked classrooms and their implications for didactics. In particular, I examine multiple contexts that appear and how they give rise to diverse practices. However, such practices often have their origin in out-of-school contexts and not in institutional discourse and curricula. Consequently, we need to understand how these practices can be explored and exploited in educational contexts. Otherwise, schools risk losing out on important cultural change and may fail to prepare learners for emergent communicative opportunities and requirements. In this paper, which is based on a longitudinal study of Norwegian teachers of English practising in technology-rich environments, I discuss the implications of teaching in and across multiple contexts that emerge in technology-rich environments. Findings indicate that we need to develop our notion of didactics so that it supports teachers working across multiple contexts. As such, didactics takes on the characteristics of a boundary object that mediates learning in and across different social worlds.

Horizontal dynamics in an inter-professional school improvement team

This study focuses on leadership development as a collaborative practice in the context of a school improvement project aimed at increasing the students’ competence in approaching factual texts in and across disciplines. Although numerous studies from surveys and self-reported data have examined what types of leadership development school leaders participate in, little attention has been paid to studying leadership development as practice. Here, leadership development involves social interaction, often in informal and inter-professional settings over time. The present study seeks to capture leadership development as practice by expanding the unit of analysis from individual responses and reports to interactions in a project team who worked over a two-year period. The analytic focus is on interactions in the boundary zone among representatives from the local educational authority in the municipality, principals from three schools, and a university. Cultural-historical activity theory constitutes the theoretical framework for the analysis. The study demonstrates how the participants struggled to identify the purposes of the project, as well as how to reach them. Thus, coming to terms with ill-defined purposes of collaboration (objects) seems to be a prerequisite for leadership development on an interdisciplinary school improvement team.

I Am Connected, Therefore I Am

A few generations ago, information used to be a scarcity. In order to get access to updated information, people met outside of churches after services or frequented the local pub or other sites where people naturally congregated. In order to transcend these geographical and physical parameters, print media and school became the primary institutional responses to increasing and improving the shared flow of information.