teaching_and_learning_with_technology

26 CONTENT REPRESENTATION
the learners can customize and reconfigure to furnish their own personal
learnplace (cf Crook, 2001).
Where does content sit in this schema? On a broad view, it is distributed. It
can be found in the cognitions and utterances of peers. It emerges and is
transformed in the activity of the learner. But given the focus of this chapter and
this section of the book, we shall locate content in the space-place area of our
schema. That is, we shall treat content in terms of its reification in texts, tools
and other artefacts. We return to this in a moment.
Terry Mayes (eg, Mayes and Neilson, 1996) has developed a three-phase
model of students’ use of technology in higher education that invokes a cycle of
conceptualization, construction and critique. These phases are best supported by
what he calls primary, secondary and tertiary courseware. Tertiary courseware is
created by interactions among learners and teachers (discourse; critique).
Secondary courseware is customized by teachers to support the knowledgeconstruction
activities of their students. Primary courseware is created by teams
of teachers and/ or professional courseware producers and is intended for use by
students of many different institutions, for the initial ‘conceptualization’ kinds of
learning activity.
We can map these three kinds of courseware onto the space-place area of the
design schema. Think of ‘space’ as denoting an abstract and/or public field,
where common goods can be located. In contrast, place is concrete, personal and
local. Primary, secondary and tertiary courseware relate to space and place
through processes of transformation and relocation. Primary and secondary
courseware reside in the common/public space. Among the tasks we set students
are ones that encourage them to interact with primary and secondary courseware,
and in so doing to construct both internal and external personal representations
of knowledge. (By internal representations we mean various cognitive/
knowledge structures—mental models, propositions, etc. By external
representations we mean such things as personal notes, diagrams, etc.) Other
tasks we set students encourage them to create texts and other shareable
representations of knowledge, and to move these —when ready—from private to
public. For example, in electronic seminars we encourage students to create
electronic texts and, when ready, to post these in their seminar group’s online
discussion area. These processes of transformation and relocation underpin the
creation of what Mayes calls tertiary courseware.
In this chapter our main focus is on primary courseware, but we are especially
concerned about how the people designing and producing it conceive of its
integration with learning activity. Within the UK there have been four major
initiatives aimed at creating such primary resources—NDPCAL (the National
Development Programme for Computer Assisted Learning, in the 1970s), CTI
(the Computers in Teaching Initiative, in the 1980s), TLTP (the Teaching and
Learning Technology Programme, in the 1990s) and DNER (the Distributed
National Electronic Resource, now). The products of TLTP and their impact
upon UK higher education were the focus of substantial evaluation studies. A