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

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Knowledge creation and object-oriented inquiry 175
Designing educational settings that promote
object- oriented inquiry
Educators face a demand of changing their traditional ways of designing teaching,
if they are inclined to experiment with the pedagogical practices of object- oriented
inquiry. Classic models of instructional design are not very applicable to collaborative
object- oriented inquiry because they mainly concentrate on individual processes
of learning and are based on the predefined structuring of content, activities, and
outcomes. The pedagogical design of object- oriented inquiry is more indirect,
focusing on organizing the preconditions for the inquiry culture but not aiming
at causally determining the learning results. Building on such views and previous
studies (e.g. Bielaczyc, 2006; Guribye, 2005; Lipponen & Lallimo, 2004; Paavola,
Lipponen, & Hakkarainen, 2002), we have started to use the notion pedagogical
infrastructure to illustrate how the pedagogical design of object- oriented inquiry
practices resembles the construction of basic physical infrastructure to support as
effective functioning of people’s daily activities as possible (Star, 1999). By exploiting
the idea of infrastructures, we argue that the functionality, implementation and
use of inquiry practices in university courses are based on, and require the creation
of, a set of interconnected structural elements into the learning setting. We have
developed the pedagogical infrastructure framework for describing the implementations
of object- oriented inquiry into actual educational settings, consisting of the
following four dimensions:
• Technical infrastructure is shaped by tools provided, especially technology that
enables and facilitates the co- construction of shared knowledge artifacts, and
the organization of the use of technology and related guidance.
• Social infrastructure is shaped by such features as the explicit arrangements to
advance collaboration; social interaction and activities around shared knowledge
objects; sharing of the process and outcomes; and the integration of
face- to- face and technology- mediated activity.
• Epistemological infrastructure is shaped by ways of operating with knowledge
and knowledge- related things that the practices and tools reflect; the role
of knowledge sources used; students’, teachers’, and knowledge artifacts’
role while creating and sharing knowledge; and the emphasis on knowledgecreating
inquiry and object- orientedness in the tasks and assignments.
• Cognitive infrastructure is shaped by features that support students’ awareness,
conscious understanding and independent mastery of the critical aspects in
the desirable practices; such as explicit modelling of the strategies of inquiry
and object- oriented knowledge work; timely guidance provided for the students;
methods used to promote metalevel reflection of the inquiry process
and object- oriented practices; and scaffolding functionalities embedded in
technology to support the desirable practices.
The four infrastructures are overlapping and cannot, in reality, be totally separated.