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

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178 H. Muukkonen et al.
assigning the sub- problems to teams, after which the teams started planning how
to conduct their study. In the third phase, based on the collected knowledge, the
teams constructed a half- hour presentation to the clients and a more extensive hard
copy version. Throughout the phases, the coordination team supervised the other
teams, and the research team studied team awareness and project- management
issues via questionnaires and interviews.
Data collection and analysis
The data examined included observation notes of the course meetings and lectures,
all database materials from the two virtual- learning environments, self- reflective
questionnaires with open- ended question the students were asked to reply to at
the end of the course, and group interviews of the student groups and the teachers
in the second case.
Pedagogical infrastructures
The pedagogical design of the courses was examined using multiple data sources,
partially reconstructed from the teachers’ descriptions, the database structures
and materials, and observations, following a model from our previous study of
implementing progressive inquiry in university courses (Lakkala, Muukkonen,
Paavola, & Hakkarainen, 2008). Given the basic similarities of the design of the
courses, a set of “how” and “what” questions where devised to examine the design
features in general and from the point of view of object- orientedness, for example,
“How does technology support object- oriented inquiry” or “How is the work
epistemologically organized around concrete knowledge objects” Three researchers
analyzed the data together in an explorative way to identify the infrastructures
and to describe the actual implementation of technical, social, epistemological,
and cognitive infrastructures in the course designs.
Shared objects
To examine students groups’ collaboration on shared objects, we had to rely on
the digital artifacts produced in or posted to the two virtual learning environments
(VLEs). The categories were produced according to subtasks for generating
knowledge that the groups were engaged with: in Case I, the categories closely
follow the sub- steps during the progressive inquiry process, but are organized by
types of products that were encountered in the database; in Case II, they are more
directly the outcomes of the sub- tasks assigned to students. Hence, we embarked
upon a categorization that deals with tangible objects. We counted the number
of different types of objects and examined their role in the groups’ collaboration.
Particularly, we were interested in the revisions made to different documents and
the versioning of reports, presentations, and conceptualizations. We considered
these as indications of working on shared objects.