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

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10 S. Ludvigsen et al.
knowledge construction in a cross- disciplinary project and with an ethical dilemma
as the point of departure. The key concept in this chapter is the emerging object.
The chapter gives a strong empirical account of how a group of learners collaborate
and how they orient themselves towards the object and its representations in the
classroom and with diverse technological resources at hand.
In Chapter 14, by Andriessen, Baker, and van der Puil, the concept of argumentation
is in focus. The focus on explicit argumentation and dialogue is growing as an
analytic perspective in research and as an instructional way of improving students’
competence in different knowledge domains. The authors make a detailed analysis
of how students perform a task in a computer- supported learning environment
and where micro- conflicts is their key analytic concept.
In higher- education settings, Dysthe, Lillejord, Wasson, and Vines analyze
“productive learning” with the ambition of showing how it ties into a cluster of
concepts that concern activity and transformation. They investigate how the dialectic
relationship between processes and products constitutes a relational space – or
zone. Two case studies support their investigation, and they find that students in
higher education benefit from being exposed to the divergent voices and conflicting
perspectives of the research community.
Institutional development
Changing practices cannot be properly understood without taking the culturalhistorical
trajectories of institutions into consideration. A closer look at this often
under- investigated aspect of human cognition and development is provided in
several of the contributions in this volume, but in the following chapters such
trajectories are in focus.
In the chapter by Schwartz and de Groot, a joint institutional developmental
process between educational designers, teachers and researchers is documented.
This developmental process leads to several breakdowns, which create new opportunities
for learning to occur. New types of learning designs are accounted for in
this chapter. The empirical context is in- service training for teachers.
In Chapter 17, Barnes and Sutherland investigate two important issues that
concern how schools can develop more productive learning trajectories. Based on
partnerships with schools and teachers, the authors have developed new tools for
analyzing the teacher’s practices. This is done in collaboration with the teachers,
so the tools and ways of analyzing classroom interaction are more attuned to the
teachers’ work practices.
Erstad examines how multiliterate practices emerge and what the role of digital
technologies is. The empirical data comes from different sources. The survey data is
related to a large- scale ICT- based reform in Norway, and the corpus of qualitative
data is based on a longitudinal study where the schools were followed over four
years. The study is what we could call a multilevel study, where different research
perspectives are deployed to understand how schools develop when different types
of ICTs are introduced and used over time.