The technological mediation of mathematics and its learning

Published in Nunes,T (ed) Special Issue, ‘Giving Meaning to Mathematical Signs: Psychological,
Pedagogical and Cultural Processes‘ Human Development, Vol 52, No 2, April, pp. 129-

ii. Designing to share objects at a distance

Turning to the issue of sharing at a distance, we have undertaken two projects
that both set out to exploit intersite connectivity (as well as face-to-face collaboration)
to promote synchronous and asynchronous sharing, discussion and co-development of
mathematical ideas. The overarching objective of both studies was to foster
appreciation of the structures and processes underlying a set of mathematical ideas
through carefully designed collaborative activities. The first project, the Playground
project sought to design systems in which children aged between 4 and 8 years, could
design, build and share simple video games. (see for example, Hoyles, Noss, &
Adamson, 2002)

As part of the study we noted an interesting shift when children moved from
face-to-face collaboration to collaborating across remote sites. This shift was
characterised by a move from socially derived rules to govern the games in the
former scenario to system rules (computational expressions) in the latter. This shift
seemed to be a result of the necessity to formalise in the absence of all the normal
richness of interaction that characterises face-to-face collaboration, where the
narrative of the game was fore grounded and rules frequently only tacitly agreed. At
a distance such tacit agreements were not available, and the narrative had to be
translated into a form that the computer could accept (for elaboration, see Noss, R.,
Hoyles, C., Gurtner, J-L., Adamson, R. & Lowe, S, 2002).

The absence of face-to-face collaboration does not in any sense guarantee the
shift towards formalisation. That it arose at all, undoubtedly owes much to the
activity structures, relationships between children, and of course, the presence of the
researchers. Nevertheless, it is interesting to speculate whether, by a more focused
and prolonged emphasis on remote collaboration with suitably designed
computational systems, new kinds of formalised discourse might be engendered in a
wider range of learning environments.

In      a      later     project,      WebLabs,      (described      earlier)

(www.lkl.ac.uk/kscope/weblabs), we attempted to scaffold interactions at a distance
by devising a web-based system, WebReports, that allowed students to post their
ideas—and their working models (using the ToonTalk programming system used in
the project) — so that students working in other classrooms could download the
models, run and interpret them, reflect on them before sending comments and

18

<<   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   >>

More intriguing information