The search for authenticity of learning situations is a concern for most designers of TEL environments. Most of them realise soon that this is a desperate project since any environment is a representation of some kind of a reference, often called "reality", which keeps staying at a distance. To be as close as possible to reality does not mean much, unless we can qualify or quantify the closeness. Indeed, this is a challenge and we are not be well equipped today to take it up. A solution might be to find a theoretical framework within which we can formulate the problem...
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Moher's team, the inventor of embedded phenomena, has designed a new generation of learning space. A space which blows the boundaries of the screen, and even of the internet: Wallcology. The quality of the technological implementation and the precise reporting of the first case studies create the context to raise very interesting question about authenticity and the design of learning situations.
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"Ambient learning" is one of the TeLearn.org keywords. This expression is not easy to translate in an other language than English, and eventually it is not easy to grasp in theoretical or technological terms. It seems reminiscent of the IST expression "ambient intelligence" or "ambient computing"... this post is a starting point to explore what "ambient learning" could mean.
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An embedded phenomenon is the emergent property of the behaviours of a set of "distributed media located around the classroom representing 'portals' into [the] phenomenon depicting local state information corresponding to [its mapping onto the physical space of the classroom]." The space of the class becomes the interface with the model which has been implemented; but it is more than that...
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The postulate: “the more a system would be able to reproduce face-to-face interaction features, the better it would be?”. The refutations: the commercial failure of WAP compared to the great success of SMS communication, the limitation of the added value of video communication...
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A chapter of the recently issued book entitled “Barriers and Biases in Computer-Mediated Knowledge Communication” stimulated my curiosity by suggesting that if social CSCL scripts seems to have a positive effect, it is not the case for epistemic scripts which have “no or negative effects on learning outcomes”. It suggested to me to consider the case from an other angle, let see...
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