ED-MEDIA 1999 Proceedings Book - Association for the ...

environment — it is impossible to separate them from the context in which they occur. The different approaches each
emphasise slightly different elements of the framework that is important to be aware of in these kinds of studies. Situated
action emphasises the emergent, contingent nature of human activity, the way activity grows directly out of the
particularities of a given situation (Nardi, 1996). Distributed cognition on the other hand, asserts as a unit of analysis a
cognitive system composed of individuals and the artefacts they use (Hutchins, 1991, Nardi, 1996). This approach
underscores the distributed nature of cognitive processes, and the role that different artefacts play in these processes. Activity
theory also emphasises the mediating role of artefacts, but stresses that these artefacts carry with them a particular culture
and history, thus, focuses on the institutional and cultural elements involved in the learning activity (Kuutti, 1996). Adoption
of these approaches provides a strong and fruitful conceptual framework that informs the evaluation of collaboration patterns
in collaborative telelearning scenarios.
Evaluation approach
The evaluation aims at a naturalistic study of how participants in collaborative telelearning organise their work and learning
activities. Ethnography (e.g. Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983) influences the design of our evaluation approach including the
choice of data collection (e.g., participant observations, unstructured interviews, video recordings) and analysis techniques
(e.g., discourse analysis, video analysis). This means that the evaluation is an iterative process where an ongoing analysis
guides the data collection emphasis in successive phases.
In order to collect data about the activities that the students engage in during their participation in the scenarios, different
methods and techniques will be used. The most important sources of information will be derived from observing the students
as they collaborate and interviewing them, and also from electronic logging of artefacts used for collaborating (e.g., email,
shared whiteboards, chats, to-do-lists) and artefacts designed (e.g., a web page) during the collaboration. It is a challenge to
carry out the participant observations since a large number of the students are geographically distributed over Norway thus
direct observation of all the students is unrealistic and too costly. Rather, an alternative technique consisting of immersing
ourselves in the virtual environment in order to observe their activities will be used. For this reason, the electronic data logs
will be an extremely important supplement to the “online” and “offline” observations. The data being logged, is not just
statistical data recording who is logged on when, but includes a periodic chronological recording of all artefacts in the
environment. This means that we can recreate versions of the environment to study the use of artefacts over time and the
creation and development of the artefacts produced in the collaboration process.
Data collected in the fall of 1998 has been analysed and used to inform the data collection in the spring 1999 scenarios. At
EDMEDIA’99 we will be able to provide a preliminary report on our findings.
References
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Acknowledgements
DoCTA is funded by The Norwegian Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs (KUF) under their Information
Technology in Education (ITU) programme. It is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Bergen (UiB),
Stord/Haugesund College (Stord), Nord-Trøndelag College (HiNT) and Telenor Research and Development (Telenor FOU).