Learning by watching

Terry Mayes, Finbar Dineen, Jean McKendree and John Lee (2002)

Learning from Watching others Learn

In

Networked Learning: Perspectives and Issues

Christine Steeples and Chris Jones (Eds)

Springer, London

Theoretical background

Vicarious learning cf Bandura

Study led them from FAQs and other specific subject matter to p214 ‘more generalized benefits, for the vicarious learner, of seeing how to engage in learning dialogues’

Mayes ‘learning as a by product of comprehension’

McKendree et al (1998) ‘dialogue central to the learners ‘enculturation’ as well as the learning itself. i.e. p215 ‘ a higher level of alignment. The learner acquires a new set of norms and procedures’ and has led to a model of how to behave as a successful learner.

The studies

P218

A study in the context of students preparing syntactic trees.

2 conditions

1. animated diagram

2. animated diagram together with a dialogue

Condition 2 gave the best results

KRO Is vicarious or imitation learning an appropriate tool for construction of understanding.

P223

A specifically designed study, students financially rewarded for outcome – ‘when students engage in discussions themselves, we find those who have seen vicarious resources have been modelling the tasks and language seen in them’ when listening to exemplar dialogues they are overhearers. (KRO lurkers in CMC)

Comment

P224

‘Stenning et al (2000) have provided an account about what aspects of educational dialogue make it particularly amenable to capture and re-use for overhearers e.g. show rather than just tell ( KRO another word for modelling)

led to a situation where ‘the authority of the tutor is largely abrogated in favour of the more abstract authority of ‘reasoning norms’ – KRO a method that could be used to engender all sorts of reasoning norms.

P225

‘in most educational settings the rules which govern overhearing are well understood and form part of the experience of learning as a member of the group.’

Why would new learners want to access previous dialogue? What motivates? ‘ will depend on the potency of the identification that the new learner can develop for the original participants and the extent to which the dialogue is considered relevant to the achievement of the learners goal …… success depends on ‘extent to which the original participants in the dialogue are seen as representative members of a target CoP’

Being a learner involves ‘ constructing an identity in relation to the community’

CoP ‘not a description of learning per se, or how people learn together. It provides a very high level design heuristic and in that sense it tells us where we should start looking for design principles which address the key question of motivation.

Look up Fowler and Mayes (1999) and ideas of learning relationships.

Gibson 2006

Gibson, W., Hall, A. and Callery, P. (2006)

'Topicality and the Structure of Interactive Talk in Face-to-face Seminar Discussions - Implications for Research in Distributed Learning Media',

British Journal of Educational Research 32(1), 77-94.

Theorertical background

Stokoe reference to topic development. ( Stokoe apparently sees affordance in a cultural sense)

‘how do people interactionally negotiate topics’ comes from questions such as ‘ how do ‘societal members produce a sense of social order through orientation to normative intersubjectively recognizable features of talk’

work so far has tended to focus on turn taking. Of particular interest is p791 ‘conversational topics become connected through members ‘ orientations towards topic’ which has led to a research method whereby you consider how apparently unrelated utterances are linked – only problem is that the links are potentially limitless.

Stokoe used these ideas and came up with

· False first – off topic

· Teacher effect – provide some structural features, e.g. define discussion task, justify limits and orientate immediate context.

KRO – but in asynchronous there are several concurrent topics.

P91 the ‘interactive turn negotiation process placed topicality in continual flux the context of the talk was significantly shaped by the nature of the interaction process’

P92 ‘ G claims that ‘the lack of simultaneous participation has posed a barrier to the creation of interactive task. As yet, however, clear specification of the type of interaction that is required/desired from such environments has yet to be effected’ Even quite high profile interactional models often fail to state what they mean by ‘interactive discussion’

transistions and emotional labour

Christie, H., Tett, L., Cree, V.E., Hounsell, J., and McCune, V. (2007)

‘ A real rollercoaster of confidence and emotions’: lear ning to be a university student,

Online Paper Series: GEO-033

online papers archived by the Institute of Geography, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:45HYVX2FvTUJ:www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/1891/1/hchristie002.pdf+Community+of+Practice+and+emotion&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESi0Y0plmFCc7_w7Ne2IwEW53NaLUvauuzXGc0J60-SR9aaiLhZnU9R7HgcOwwbBGU1IIK0m69EkPjTyBlETEv1ei3-4YSgsvv2axlfaNq6KYXjdz-KpFRXeyJRAZevcqNE89gX2&sig=AHIEtbQ8NX5aJ5GiMr8ZDQQ1sp4L-1oe4A

http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/1891/1/hchristie002.pdf.

Longditudinal study of students moving from FE to an elite university.

P5 Despite (Gibbs 1992, Kolb 1984, Rogers 1975) ‘the literature has remarkably little to say about the emotional dimensions of learning ( Brown 2000, Boler 1999). There is little investigation of the emotional impulse to learning – of the difference that confidence, motivation, perseverance and creativity make to the individual’s wider disposition to learning, or the potential changes in learning identities.’

P6 Moving beyond theories that focus on individual cognitive abilities and processes

Lave and Wenger (1991) –‘theory of situated learning’ - ‘seeks to explain changes in learning practices when individuals become exposed to new influences and new situations’ learning as participation in social practice. ‘From this perspective significant learning is what changes our ability to engage in practice and to understand why we do it. Such learning has to do with the development of our practices and our ability to negotiate meaning’

P8

The paper considers ‘ the ways in which emotional processes underpin and become entangled with the social process of learning’ emotional labour involved in belonging to a project group.

The Study

Longitudinal over 3-4 years. Students entering an elite University from FE college. Interviews 2 in the first year.

‘Although not questioned directly about the emotional aspects of their learning experience, this emerged as an important theme in their interview data’

Ist interview at the beginning of the semester p9 ‘strong sense of exhilaration and excitement’ (Christie et al, 2006) few reported the same in the second round of interviews ‘p10 ‘ some students found the changes horrendous and stressful others thought ‘it was a rollercoaster of confidence and emotions’ and many described themselves at best ‘coping’ due to ‘learning shock’ p11 during the first semester ‘ differences had to be identified and the respondents learn how to be university students’ the loss of the familiar ‘ the effort students put in to learning to find their way about the campus and the potentially disclocating effects of this, should not be under-estimated’ p12 ‘ unfamiliarity with protocol and procedure, and the emotional insecurity it engendered, was a recurrent feature of the students’ account of transition’

Comment on findings

P14 ‘Accounts which privilege the rational dimensions of learning stress that expertise and learning competence are located in the individual and are independent of context’ “relying on a rational approach to learning misses the existence of ‘embedded’ or ‘tacit’ knowledge which resides in systemic routines and formal procedures’ “ Following Lave and Wenger (1991) our analysis suggests that to undertake ‘significant learning’ the students had to change their ability to participate in the social practices of learning.’

P16 ‘Our evidence suggests two ways in which the emotional processes of learning were entangled in the creation of new communities of practice. First, students developed new ways of learning: and secondly, these changes in practices and the identity work they undertook helped them to develop a sense of belonging to and membership of the wider learning community’

“Only be recognizing difference could they begin to engage with the new learning environment and begin to make it familiar, understandable and usable’

p20 ‘Membership generally was perceived as involving two aspects: first, participating in the social practices to do with learning: and secondly, participating in the social practices to do with student life’ p21 ‘emotional commitment to studying was a central factor in motivating and enabling them to create new ways of participating in a community of practice and in the process transform understanding of the community itself’

p24 ‘ We have shown that engagement with learning is a subjective experience bound up with other life events and experiences ‘

p26 ‘moving to a different learning environment brings new sets of risks and uncertainties because the students must negotiate the meaning and significance of the everyday practices embodied in the new learning setting. Being and becoming a successful learner is as much about the social and emotional, as well as the cognitive dimensions of learning.’ “Whilst it is important for universities to be concerned with the quality of their teaching programmes, the interactive, social and collaborative aspects of students’ learning experiences, captured in the accounts of the social situatedness of learning, are also important determinants of graduate outcomes’

Important references

Griffiths, S., Winstanley, D. and Gabriel, Y. (2005) Laerning shock: the trauma of return to formal learning Management Learning 36(3): 275-297.

Christie, H. , Munro, M., and Wager, F. (2005) /Day students’ in higher education: widening access students and successful transitions to university life.

International Studeis in Sociology of Education 15(1): 3-29.

I-Y, Damasio PNAS article

Neural correlates of admiration and compassion (2009)

May Helen Immordino-Yang, Andrea McColl, Hanna Damasio & Antonio Damasio

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 109, 19, 8021-8026

Compassion for physical pain CPP

Compassion for social/psychological pain CSP

Admiration for virtue AV

Admiration for skill AS

Social emotions play a critical role in interpersonal relationships and moral behavior .

Take admiration & compassion as examples.

Social

Admiration ….. reward

Compassion…. Remedy

Personal

Heightened self-awareness and evaluation

P8021 ‘ the extent to which we use neural systems related to sensing and regulating our own body and consciousness to react emotionally to the physical and psychological situation of others has not been investigated comprehensively’

Need to make a critical distinction between recognising a circumstance and responding to it.

Responding to physical v responding to psycho-social

‘if the neural mechanisms involved in empathy for another’s physical situation e.g. anterior insula for pain, are also involved in psych-social an important question relates to the timing of the neural activity involved. For example, compassion for physical pain is evolutionarily well established ( ref 29) and develops early in children ( ref 30) whereas CSP would require more substantial cognitive processing elated to cultural factors.

Making inferences : The neurobiology of social cognition

Areas involved

1. Temporoparietal junction (TPJ)

2. Mesial prefrontal cortex

3. 3 contiguous areas, of posteriomedial cortices (PMC)

i. posterior cingulate

ii. retrosplenial area The retrosplenial region is a brain area and part of the cingulate cortex. It is defined by Brodmann area 26, Brodmann area 29 and the Brodmann area 30. Retrosplenial cortex has dense reciprocal projections with both the anterior thalamic nuclei and the hippocampus. In humans fMRI studies implicate the posterior cingulate region in the recall of episodic information. The retrosplenial cortex is one of several brain areas that when damaged produce anterograde amnesia.

iii. Precuneous The precuneus is located on the inside between the two cerebral hemispheres in the rear region between the somatosensory cortex and forward of the cuneus (which contains the visual cortex). It is above the posterior cingulate. Following Korbinian Brodmann it has traditionally been considered a homogeneous structure and with limited distinction between it and the neighboring posterior cingulate area. Brodmann mapped it as the medial continuation of lateral parietal area 7. Axon tracing research on macaque monkeys has established that it consists of three subdivisions which now have been confirmed by fMRI upon resting-state functional connectivity to also exist in humans (parallel fMRI research has also been done upon monkeys). The precuneus seems to be a recently expanded part of the brain, as in less developed primates such as New world monkeys "the superior parietal and precuneate regions are poorly developed".[1] It has been noted that "the precuneus is more highly developed (i.e. comprises a larger portion of the brain volume) in human beings than in non-human primates or other animals, has the most complex columnar cortical organization and is among the last regions to myelinate".The mental imagery concerning the self has been located in the forward part of the precuneus with posterior areas being involved with episodic memory. Another area has been linked to visuospatial imagery. (It is not though clear how these—and the functions noted below—link with the above three subdivisions.) Self Functional imaging has linked the precuneus to the processes involved in self-consciousness, such as reflective self-awareness, that involve rating ones own personality traits compared to those judged of other people.[ Memory The precuneus is involved in memory tasks, such as when people look at images and try to respond based on what they have remembered in regard to verbal questions about their spatial details.[8] It is involved with the left prefrontal cortex in the recall of episodic memories[9] including past episodes related to the self.[7] The precuneus is also involved in source memory (in which the "source" circumstances of a memory are recalled) with the left prefrontal cortex: here its role is suggested to be providing rich episodic contextual associations used by the prefrontal cortex to select the correct past memory.[10] In the recollection of memories, it has been suggested that the precuneus 'decides' whether context information exists that can be useful for involving the aid of the hippocampus.)

Literature review

1. TPJ attributing mental beliefs (33,34)

2. Mesial prefrontal – generating inferences about another person’s mental state and psychological characteristics (31,32)

3. PMC in social tasks(35) and episodic memory(36) has not been clarified. Neuropsych. Research suggests involvement in consciousness, specifically in the construction of self (37). ‘ in light of the evidence that simulation on one’s own self is an important means to understand others ( ref 38 review and 39-41) leads to the possibility that the experience of a & c would differentially engage the PMC.

Aims and hypotheses

To test whether and how areas of the brain involved in homeostatic regulation and consciousness would be involved during the feeling of different varieties of A & C , presumably with different patterns.

1. h1 A&C would engage nuclei in the brainstem and hypothalamus and somotosensory cortices in introceptive ( anterior insula) and extraceptive sectors ( somotosensory association areas including the superior parietal lobe and supramarginal gyrus)

2. h2 A&C would engage PMC

3. h3 activity in anterior insula would peak and dissipate more quickly for CPP than for CSP ( or varieties of admiration)

Method

Design

4 conditions AV,AS,CPP,CSP were experiementally induced by narratives based on episodes from the lives of real people. Supplemeted by audio/sill & live images. The control acondition was an enagaging, social and active narrative.

Protocol see I-Y including the use of psychophysiological (HR, RR) to identify which parts of the BOLD signal to analyse.

ERA (event related averages) and a bootstrap procedure were used to compare time-to-peak and duration of BOLD in insula, among conditions

Analysis

ANCOVA – to contrast BOLD from each condition

Results ( between condition analysis)

Average reported emotional strength during scanning

AS lower than other conditions

Psychophysiological

Respiration rate similar between all conditions

HR greater than control for AV & CSP and a trend for CPP but similar to AS. Led to the conclusion that it is unlikely that any differences in BOLD is due to arousal.

BOLD

Hypothalamus Mesencephalon Postmedullary junction	All conditions	Expected as these are regions which include nuclei involved in autonomic regulation
Medulla	AV & CSP
Anterior middle cingulate Cortical areas that sense body, including anterior insula & supramraginal gyrus	All conditions
PMC area
Posterior cingulate	AS & CPP
Anterior cingulate, anterior insula,hypothalamus	AV &CSP	Homeostatic regulation
Inferior/posterior section of the PMC	AV and CSP	Interoceptive processing
Superior/anterior of PMC	AS & CPP	Musculoskeletal processing

ERA: Comparison of time courses based on % change in BOLD. CPP peaked more quickly and had a shorter duration.

Conclusions

i. The same homeostatic regulatory mechanisms are engaged in the experience of A & C i.e. social emotions use some of the same basic devices involved in primary emotions.

ii. In PMC AV & CSP were associated with strong activation in the inferior/posterior portion of PMC and area ( in the macaque monkey) that is strongly associated with the anterior middle cingulate cortex which is itself strongly connected with the insular cortex. In contrast AS and CPP showed activation in superior/anterior (AV &CSP also showed to a lesser degree). P8024 ‘ consistent with anatomical findings, our data suggest a functional subdivision in the PMC regarding emotional processing. Emotions related to someone else’s ‘psychological’ state ….may preferentially recruit a network ……. which are infiltrated with interoceptive information, by contrast emotions related to someone’s physical state …… may recruit a sector of PMC most connected with lateral parietal cortices suggesting a connection to exteroception and musculoskeletal information’

iii. ‘Overall these results suggest that the processing of social emotions is organised less around the kind of emotional response, be it compassionate or admiring, than around the contents and context of the situation’ ‘Although it is known that the anterior insula is involved in compassion for physical pain, our findings that activity in this region peaked more quickly and for a shorter duration during CPP than during CSP (and AV and AS) suggests that emotions about others’ physically painful predicaments co-opt neural mechanisms for personally experienced pain more efficiently and directly……………in order for emotions about the psychological situations of others to be induced and experienced, additional time may be needed for the introspective processing of culturally shaped knowledge. The rapidity and parallel processing of attention requiring information which hallmark the digital age, (WHOOPS see IY PNAS interview) might reduce the frequency of full experience of such emotions with potentially negative consequences’

Horizon report 2010

Johnson,L., Levine,A., Smith,R., & Stone,S. (2010) The 2010 Horizon Report, Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

http://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/about/

P3 technologies identified ‘embedded within a contemporary context that reflects the realities of the time both in the sphere of academia and the world at large’

Trends 2010-2015

1. ‘The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the internet’

2. ‘people expect to work, learn, & study wherever they want to’ logistics of balancing demands are increasingly complex so that there are implications for just in time, informal(found) learning.’

3. ‘The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and out notions of IT support are decentralized’

4. ‘The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross-campus collaborations between departments

Challenges 2010-2015

1. ‘need for the academy to adapt teaching and learning practices to meet the needs of today’s learners’ i.e. emphasise critical inquiry and mental flexibility, application of learning to broad social issues and large complex problems’

2. digital scholarship – what metrics’

3. digital literacy ‘as technology continues to evolve, digital literacy must necessarily be less about tools and more about ways of thinking and seeing and crafting narrative’ need to prepare students appropriately

4. focus on key goals as a result of shrinking budgets. A good response would be to identify trends eg cloud computing can mitigate this effect.

Technologies to watch ( with timeframes for wide-spread adoption)

Mainstream , within 12 months

1. Mobile computing.

Raises concerns about privacy, classroom management, personal/other time, access, usability

2. Open Content

involves devising licences & metadata schemes. Ideas of social responsibility. Outgrowth ‘ the emergence of open-context textbooks that can be remixed. Currently open-context community is diffuse and distributed’ learning to find, access and repurpose is a ‘valuable skill for an emerging scholar’

inform a wide variety of learning modalities including the sheer joy of discovery! – CoPs have formed around open resources’

http://creativecommons.org

Medium within 2-3- years

3. Electronic books

p17 ‘Paper & ink, colour, font, type size, even the way pages are turned, are all customizable. Text is clear and crisp with enough contrast to make it easy to read, and the devices are comfortable to hold for long periods of time’

4. Augmented reality

Is ‘ establishing a foothold in the consumer sector, and in a form much easier to access than originally envisioned’

http://henryjenkins.org/2008/07/an-interview-with-eric-klopfer.html. Eric Klopfer is a games developer. Interview provides insight into why this area of AR has promise in education and beyond’

Longer term 4-5 years

5. Gesture based computing

‘devices controlled by natural movements of the finger, hand, arm or body. Game companies ……’ exploring the potential offered by consoles that do not require a hand-held controller but instead recognise and interpret body motions’

‘as we work with devices that react to us instead of requiring us to learn to work with them, our understanding of what it means to interact with computers is beginning to change’

examples are ipod/ipads & Nintendo Wii ‘accept input in the form of taps, swipes & other ways of touching.

P25

Iphone ‘additionally can react to manipulation of the device itself eg shaking, tilting. ‘ ‘we are seeing a gradual shift towards interfaces that adapt to – or are built for – human and human movements.

‘Apple’s Remote app for the iphone turns the mobile device into a remote control for the Apple TV; users can search, play ………..just by gliding a finger over the iphone’s surface’

i.e. p26 ‘machine responds to movements that feel natural ‘ also ‘gestural interfaces can often be used by more than one person at a time’

Some resources

Parkinson’s patients go to wii-hab

http://www.livescience.com/technology/090611-wii-parkinsons.html

Live Science, 11 June 2009

The Best Computer Interfaces: Past, Present and Future

http://www.technology.review.com/computing/22393/page/

http://delicious.com/tag/hz10+altinput

6. Visual data analysis

‘blend of statistics, data mining & visualisation’

Taps into p29 ‘the ability of humans to see patterns and structure in even the most complex visual presentations’

Gapminder ( http://www.gapminder.org) ? principal components analysis – analysis of multivariate datasets over time.

Many eyes, Wordle, Flwoing data, Gapminder, Roambi (http://newpolitical interfaces.org)

P30

‘VDA may help expand our understanding of learning itself. Learning is one of the most complex of social processes, with a myriad of variables interacting in ways that are not well understood, making it an ideal focus for the search for patterns’ it can also have value for the study of the foundation of learning communities.

http://www.insideria.com/2009/12/28-rich-data-visualization-too.html. Theresa Neil, O’Reilly’s Inside RIA, 10 December 2009)

lots of examples

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc

article http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EL17052.pdf

http://delicious.com/tag/hz10+analytics

Shwartz at CEN

Shwartz talk at CEN

Compares approaches of neuroscience & education

· Cog neuroscience tend to look at outlier group – motivated to improve any deficits

· Educators , context is important ie the things they can control such as instructional tasks, classroom environment – they want to improve learning across the whole range

Education approach to application

Nothing as practical as a good theory

Needs theories to guide actions in the field

Education guided by broad, orientating theories eg Vygotsky, Marx

Do not really need to understand too much to help shape thinking about learning.

Education & psychology have a number of standing debates that have defied resolution

· Being told v discovery

· Decomposition v authentic practice

· Motivation v cognition

Possible research approach

Schwartz ‘hard to treat ‘motivation’ and ‘cognition’ separately when it comes to learning in the brain

Therefore lets try an approach to research that takes both into account.

Slide 57: Chen et al, Shohany et al. comparing agent with person. Note important to manipulate belief about agent. Greater arousal transfer & transfer for the person condition

Hippocampus, amygdala, reward/feedback circuitry implicated

Research led to following application

Manipulated belief and then compared science learning based on a website with a teach agent with self learning. Irrespective of prior level of achievement teach agent superior over self learning.

Comment on previous example as a way of doing interdisciplinary research

1. Started with contextual manipulation ( guided people’s beliefs)

2. Targeted a theoretical bottleneck – cognitive and affective accounts of social learning

3. Novel phenomena that both disciplines could use

4. Produces a corridor of explanation

· Not providing a single explanation of effect

· Working at multiple levels of explanation

Will they get linked up ? generative in the meantime