Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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Chapter 7
Intersecting trajectories of
participation
Temporality and learning
Sten Ludvigsen, Ingvill Rasmussen, Ingeborg
Krange, Anne Moen and David Middleton
Introduction
Time is a key issue in learning. When communicating past experiences and in
planning future events, we create events where learning can occur. In any setting,
there are meeting points, or zones, where participants create common objects. In
these zones different temporalities intersect. Time is also central in tool use and
in our organisation of activities. The semiotic potential of new technologies carries
types of knowledge and potentials for meaning- making. Our view is that such
artifacts connect us to our past and to how knowledge has been socially organised
and accumulated. In other words, the actions and activities in which we participate
are part of a process of historical socio- genesis (Valsiner, 1998; Valsiner and van
der Veer, 2000; Ludvigsen in press).
At the same time, introduction of new technologies can rupture current practices
in unpredictable ways. Their introduction and use creates the basis for tensions and
breakdowns in any ordering of practice. The creation of new stabilities in practices
using new technologies is dependent upon the re- orderings and emergence of
new knowledge and competence. Time is also a critical factor in such interactional
ordering of knowledge and for competencies necessary for the creation of new
stabilities of practice in the use of new technologies. What exactly lies in these
tensions and gaps, and what the new knowledge and competencies are, needs to
be investigated and articulated.
This chapter discusses the concept of time in learning with particular reference to
its potential for understanding learning in and through intersecting trajectories of
participation. The temporal- spatial aspects of trajectories of participation are generally
overlooked within cognitive theories of learning, but they are accounted for in
a variety of ways within sociocultural perspectives on cognition and learning.
Our aim in this chapter is to create such a theoretical account based on a sociocultural
perspective. We will use empirical data to illustrate what we can achieve
analytically when using a multiplicity of timescales and intersecting trajectories of
participation as central concepts in the study of learning. The data are gathered
from health- and school- based settings. The chapter is organised according to the
following two questions: