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

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368 O. Lindwall and J. Ivarsson
the auspices of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967, 2002; Livingston, 1987) and
conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992; Schegloff, 2007). What these studies have in
common is that social actions are examined as practical accomplishments and
that “the logic and organization of such actions is a practical logic, an achieved
organization, locally produced, in situ, in the ‘there and then’ and the ‘here
and now’” (Psathas, 1995, p. 3). As argued for elsewhere, a consequence of this
approach, when applied to educational situations is that we have “to bracket our
preconceived notions about good teaching, learning, scientific reasoning, and the
subject matter content in order to focus on what the students are actually doing
and how they understand the task and each other’s actions” (Lindwall & Lymer,
2008, p. 190).
By sharing these presumptions, the approach taken in this study is similar to the
study by Roschelle (1992). The question posed in that study, “how can two (or
more) people construct shared meanings for conversations, concepts, and experiences”
(ibid., p. 236) indicates an interest in how the students actually are working
together, what they do, what they make relevant, and how they orient towards a
subject matter content in certain ways. This interest is addressed throughout the
analyses of Roschelle and is partially addressed by showing, for instance, how the
students talk in ways that differ from textbook science. In leaving the specifics of
the interaction in order to characterize “the nature of the process through which
convergent conceptual change occurred” (ibid., p. 246), Roschelle highlights:
(i) the production of a deep- featured situation, in relation to (ii) the interplay of
physical metaphors, through the constructive use of (iii) interactive cycles of conversational
turn- taking, constrained by (iv) the application of progressively higher
standards of evidence for convergence (ibid., p. 237). In the end of our study, we
provide a similar list of characteristics. By taking an interest in the differences that
make a difference between activities afforded by Graphs & Tracks and probeware,
however, the list will be more specific as to what differentiate the two activities. We
would also urge the reader to understand the list of characterizations in relation
to the analyses rather than in the abstract. In fact, since none of the identifying
details of the students’ work is preserved in the transformation, the reasons for
doing detailed analyses of students’ interaction are lost if it is read by itself.
The analysis reported in Lindwall and Ivarsson (2004), where we initially contrasted
the activities afforded by probeware and Graphs & Tracks, was performed in
several steps. First, approximately 60 hours of recorded interaction were reviewed
in search for some recurrent differences in the ways the students approached the
tasks in the two learning environments. Later, it was decided to pick out one task
from each lab and to analyze how all (eight) groups solved the tasks on the two
occasions. After the iterative procedure of viewing and analyzing the videotapes
and transcripts, some ways of acting in the environments – arguably relevant for
their developing understanding of kinematics – were identified. In an attempt
to depict the students’ conduct, so as to maintain the identifying details of the
activities analyzed, we have used some conventions taken from comics. Sometimes,
comics are referred to as sequential art (Eisner, 1985) and it is this sequentiality,