REM vol.1 n.2 December 2009

REM

Research on Education and Media

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December 2009

SIX-MONTHLY JOURNAL

Erickson

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December 2009

SIX-MONTHLY JOURNAL

REM

Research on Education and Media

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REM Research on Education and Media The magazine is published twice per year (hard-copy in Italian and online in English).

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Subscriptions office Tel. 0461 950690 Fax 0461 950698 info@erickson.it The Review is registred by the Court of Trento at number 1388, 19/06/2009 ISSN: 2037-0849 Editor in Chief Pier Cesare Rivoltella

Editor in Chief Pier Cesare Rivoltella Scientific Committee Ignacio Aguaded Gómez (Universidad de Huelva) Andrew Burn (London University) Ulla Carlsson (Göteborg University) Maria D’Alessio (Sapienza Università di Roma) Thierry De Smedt (Université de Louvain) Luciano Galliani (Università di Padova) Walter Geerts (Univerisiteit Antwerpen) Pierpaolo Limone (Università di Foggia) Laura Messina (Università di Padova) Mario Morcellini (Sapienza Università di Roma) Nelson Pretto (Universidade da Bahia) Vitor Reia-Baptista (Universidade do Algarve) Mario Ricciardi (Politecnico di Torino) Pier Cesare Rivoltella (Università Cattolica di Milano) Luisa Santelli Beccegato (Università di Bari) Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Stanford University) Editor Pierpaolo Limone Referees Committee The referees committee includes 20 well-respected Italian and foreign researchers. The names of the referees for each printing year are disclosed in the first issue of the following printing year. The referral process is under the responsibility of the Journal’s Editor in Chief.

Referral process Each article is anonymously submitted to two anonymous referees. Only articles for which both referees will express a positive judgment will be accepted. The referees evaluations will be communicated to the authors, including guidelines for changes. In this case, the authors are required to change their submissions according to the referees guidelines.

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INDEX

Editorial Educating competencies in digital society Pier Cesare Rivoltella

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159

Media tools and learning processes: Reflections on improving practices Manuela Cantoia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

Sud-Est: Technology and guidance Maria Grazia Celentano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

Otranto in the Middle Ages Luigi Oliva, Giovanni Alosio e Lucio T. De Paolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

Museums and new educational spaces Paola Oliveri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

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Learning, teamwork and technologies in the classroom Davide Parmigiani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Social Network Analysis for Moodle: How to evaluate the informal learning and its dynamics in virtual contexts Nicolò Antonio Piave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

Implicit theories of teaching in socio-constructivist virtual environments Flavia Santoianni e Claudia Sabatano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

Experiential and narrative elements in the learning processes Gabriella Taddeo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

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EDITORIAL

REM – Educating competencies in digital society On 21-24 October was held in Bellaria (Italy) the Final Congress of the programme EUROMEDUC. This is a programme of the European Community aimed to recommend to the Community itself some suggestions about Media Literacy in the age of digitalization. The programme was run during the last two years, through the organization of regional workshops (in Paris, in Bruxelles, in Faro), involving scholars and educators around the themes of digital competencies and citizenship.

In Bellaria, as one of the experts of the Programme, I was invited to give my key-note speech to the second plenary session of the Congress. In it I considered some points I ind really important for a relection about media and education in our cultural context.

1. The european Recommendation 18 December 20061 states the frame of the eight citizenship competencies that schools and longlife education have to develop. In this frame is included what the frame itself deines “digital competence”. This is an interesting turning point for the social reception of Media Literacy: what was previously thought only as one of the many “educations” our school systems should think to, now becomes one of the main competencies we have to provide for the future citizens we are educating. The switch is from an idea of Media Literacy as a choice to a new idea of Media Literacy as a core part 1

In Internet, URL: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=O J:L:2006:394:0010:0018:en:PDF.

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of a wider Citizenship Education (Rivoltella, 2008). This is the reason why the European Reccomendation 20 August 20092 can say that «Media Literacy is a matter of inclusion and citizenship in today’s information society. (…) Media literacy is today regarded as one of the key prerequisites for an active and full citizenship in order to prevent and diminish risks of exclusion from community life».

2. What does it means to develop a digital competence?

Almost three issues: – skills: to be able to use IST (Information Society Technologies) in job-oriented and everyday activities; communicate; produce, ind, store, share and evaluate informations; – critical thinking: to be aware of risks and opportunities of technologies; to be able to read and analyse messages; – creative acting: to be able to produce contents, to express itself in these new languages, to be able to use these tools in an innovation perspective.

3. The Recommendation talks about Information Society Technologies (IST). The normal trend is to think about these in terms of: computer, Internet and its applications (nowadays I suppose mostly 2.0 applications such as Facebook, blogs, wikies and all the other Social Network tools). But we don’t forget that, in the Information Society, we have: – some other technologies really belonging to youngsters’ and adults’ everyday life, like mobile phones, MP3 players and videogame consoles; – some other media, probably not so “new” but “renewed” by the digital convergence and inally remediated (Bolter & Grusin, 2000): television, cinema (now available on a lot of different screens), radio, newspapers.

So, when we talk about digital competence, we have to mean this competence in a wide sense. We have to include in this also those media competencies that Media Literacy traditionally ought to be powered about the so called “old media”. In the mesure these media became “new”, making part of the new digital media arena, it should be quite 2

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strange do not consider them in the development of the tomorrow citizens’ education.

4. The actual media arena is really changed if we compare it with the previous one. This change is well described

by Roger Silverstone (2007). The media arena (he names «Mediapolis») is: – a space of appearence, i.e. a space where the world could appear and an appearence belonging to the structure of the world itself; – not only the extension of the “phisic” social and political arena (as Annah Arendt said), but part of this arena itself; – a space where we can experiment the convergence of discourse and action. Better: in this space every discourse is an action. As I already said in one of my books (Rivoltella, 2003), the media arena is a pragmatic arena where we really understand what John Langshaw Austin meant when he talked about our possibility of «doing things with words».

5. The media arena is at the same time a space of experience for youngsters, an effective marketplace for industries and a “classroom” for educators.

6. Youngsters’ experience in the media arena is characterized by different activities. They use the media in their free-time (mainly videogames and music), they foster their social relations thanks to them (this is the case of instant messaging and mobile phones), they produce messages publishing them in the public space (when they take a photo or make a video and then they publish them in Youtube, in Flickr or in another web space). All these activities aid to describe a consumption proile of the youngsters quite different from those we already knew before. And there are two main aspects that are making new this proile: the irst one is that youngsters nowadays are really “dressing the media”, so that their presence is persistent and meaningful representing the natural space for a lot of activities; on the other side, youngsters are nowadays more active, they are less receivers and more authors, being able to produce and publish messages. Here we have a substantial change. Youngsters are no more people we have to protect from bad messages or from the risks they could ind interacting with the media; on the contrary they are somebody we have to make responsible 161

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for his/her own acts. The change is from protection to responsibility. It’s a change forcing us to reconsider our representation of Childhood and Adolescence as an Innocence Age: to educate their responsibility means to consider them citizens and prepare them to be conscious of this fact.

7. The media arena is at the the present time both a chance and a challenge for Media Industries. It’s a chance, because the media arena is wide, youngsters are populating it and youngsters are a driver for the market. The problems here – from the education point of view — are concerning the quality of the contents, the quantity of the access, the marketing actions aiming to reach adults using youngsters as a target. Probably we need a new alliance between industries and education. Media Literacy could represent for them a good opportunity for a self-regulation able to balance educative attention and market-orientation.

Several are the proposals in this way: the presence of media educators in the corporations, the presence of media professionals in the schools, the research of new quality formats and services for youngsters.

8. We said that media arena is a class-room for educators.

And it is true. The problem is that educators – both in family and in school – seem to be not able to stay in this class-room in a meaningful way. Parents are really far from sons’ ways of consumption: they don’t know what youngsters do with the media, they think that computer and Internet are important for their future but they are very concerned with the risks of these technologies. So, normally they address to the schools the responsibility in educating children about the media: in this way they try to remove the problem, convincing themselves that it belongs to others. The situation in schools is not so better.

In this case we have a problem with the curricula – whose preoccupation for technologies and skills is too big, and on the contrary the preoccupation for media culture is too small – and with the teachers. Their training remains a big question: they normally don’t have competencies and tend to resolve the matter on the side of technological skills. On the contrary, the problem with media and technologies is a problem of methods and techniques: we don’t have to learn to use media, but to transform our teaching behaviours thanks to the media.

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9. In all these cases one of the main problems is how to evaluate processes and outcomes. Evaluation is almost about contents. In the old media arena this problem was related practically to the issue of quality: the civil society, the associations of parents and of the media, normally invoked in that situation standards and controls for granting this quality. In actual media arena the problem is really more dificult: social media tend to be considered good even if their quality is bad. So: what is a quality content?

Is it good if it informs us about a fact, but its images and sounds are bad? What are the criteria according to which we can evaluate this? On the other side, wĂˆve also a big problem in the case of assessment. What does it mean to assess students abou their media competencies? It is not so easy. We cannot use the traditional assessment tools: in fact they normally mesure the presence of informations, and not the quality of a performance. So, we have here to change our way of assessment adopting methods and techniques of authentic assessment, i.e. ethnograic observation, embedded tasks, portfolios, and so on.

Pier Cesare Rivoltella President of SIREM

References Bolter, J.D., Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation. Cambridge (Ma): MIT Press.

Rivoltella, P.C. (2003). Costruttivismo e pragmatica della comunicazione on line. Trento: Erickson.

Rivoltella, P.C. (Ed) (2008). Digital Literacy. Herschey (Pa): IGI. Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and Morality. On the rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Media tools and learning processes: Reflections on improving practices Manuela Cantoia

ABSTRACT

Department of Psychology, Chatolic University of “Sacro Cuore”, Largo Gemelli, 1 – 20123 Milan. E-mail: manuela.cantoia@unicatt.it

International contributions about media education, as reviews highlighted, are more and more heterogeneous. There is the need to relect on a couple of questions: do media improve learning on their own or in function of their symbolic and/ or social value? Secondly, is it right to assess the impact of media on learning without considering instructional methodologies? A few issues to be considered when a learning path supported by media is proposed.

Keywords: learning; educational media.

Nowadays people lean more and more on computers and new media in their everyday-life (ofices, banks, shopping activities, social relationships, and all kind of services). According to the Istat report (2008), in 2007 almost half of the Italian families owed a computer (47.8%, of which the 38.8% with Internet connection).1 Furthermore, in recent years Italian students dealt with informatics as a subject mat1

As far as other media are concerned, the Istat report (2008) describes that 93.8% of Italian families looks television, 62.8% listen to the radio and 58.1% read newspaper. Portable telephones belong to 85.5% of the families. In ten years, the percentage of computers has passed from the 16% (1997) to 47.8% (Istat, 2008).

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ter from the primary school. Nonetheless, in many cases the number of tools in the families or at school does not coincide with an actual knowledge about them. On the other side, the relation between learning and technologies is still rather controversial.

Is the process of learning really improved by new technologies?

One can identify three main views — which not exclude themselves reciprocally — about the relation between learning and media: a) media improve learning by their own; b) media affect learning processes in function of their symbol value; c) media improve learning in function of the instructional intention of the teacher.

This contribution is aimed irst at providing arguments against the irst view: it is not the instrument in itself, rather the use of the instrument that affects learning.

Second, it is aimed at discussing the role of the beliefs and knowledge about new media in the learning process and the need of integrating the use of multimedia tools within an educational and instructional project.

Convictions about media tools In our society, media have brought many changes at different levels: language, beliefs and practices. As far as a “culture of the new media” is concerned, it is worth exploring the way media are perceived by common people. How are media introduced to the children? What kind of message do they refer to? The well-known analogy between the mind and the computer apart, information terms are frequently used in the common language (e.g. in Italian: resettare, processare, etc.); the movies, as well as press, often propose sketches on the relations with technologies: novice or aged people being puzzled, technologies taking the role of humans, etc.

Although many people believe that the presence (and the use) of computers mirrors a high quality of the school, new technological tools do not represent the only (best) way to learn. Folk beliefs about media tools typically concern two ideas: computers can do/know everything; people (teachers) who use media tools look more competent and trustable.

If children receive messages about the omniscience of the media, they will develop a warped perception about them and their characteristics. These misleading beliefs will lead to a warped idea of media’s potentialities in the learning process: children could attribute to the tool the abilities that they should activate, or approach it in a more passive way («The computers gives all the answers, I am not compelled to look for them!»). Similarly, if adults get convicted that media can renew their social image or ill their lack of competence, they risk to misunderstand their actual goals.

In all the cases, when students and teachers with different beliefs meet in the class, they work with different expectations and attitudes toward the tools, and this situ166

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ation compromises the learning outcomes. Such a risk is documented in a study on students and teachers in junior high school who were asked to ill a questionnaire on their expectations about the use of educational software. A comparison of the responses highlighted the different approach: teachers believed to a larger extent that software could make contents more convincing, that they require preview and perceptive abilities. Teachers fear that using media tools could be too much involving and more useful for people with a sense of adventure. On the contrary, students thought that educational software helps to make a schema of the contents and can facilitate visual and logic cognitive styles (Antonietti & Cantoia, 2001; see also Antonietti & Giorgetti, 2003).

Beliefs about media can develop independently from direct practice. We can make ourselves an idea (a more or less adequate one) about a tool we have never used. Nevertheless research showed that the use of peculiar typologies of media can affect the vision of learning and of the role of the learner (see Antonietti & Cantoia, 2008). Thus, in order to develop adequate ideas about the actual potentialities of media, it would be important to increase the range of experiences in a supported and relective way, underlining the different levels of activation of each tool (e.g. television has a different degree of activation compared to the computer: students could be invited to ind out how and why by direct experience and relection).

Media tools: Fashion or need?

Studies indicate that multimedia instruments do not necessary guarantee best/ different learning results, at least not in the students’ spontaneous behaviour. As far as a relation among cognitive styles and suring styles is concerned, researches have come to controversial results as well as the experiments which propose the comparison between traditional and hypermedia learning environments.2 Outcomes improve when the potentialities, the paths and the characteristics of the tool are made explicit, instead. Nonetheless, tools keep on fascinating folk convictions about learning improvements.

Anyway, the focus of the question is not the necessity of the medium itself, rather the knowledge developed about it. Media do not work on their own; they need to be included in an educational and instructional project coherently with the teacher’s actions. New technologies often represent an “event” in the experience of the students: they receive a traditional instruction across all classes and one hour a week they move 2

A review of the literature is proposed in Antonietti & Cantoia, 2008.

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to the informatics classroom with a variety of purposes or at times teachers devise a project in which technology plays a central role.3 Unfortunately, as far as students do not get used to technologies as normal and integrated instruments of their school experience, they won’t actually beneit of its potentialities.

Media can personalise and improve learning only if students become aware of the learning environment and strategies; in the other cases, media just represent a different way to learn.

Literature shows that novice students are generally favoured by the possibility to relect on the strategies while they are carrying out a task and by a free and active exploration of the learning environment (e.g., McNamara & Shapiro, 2005). Moreover, media improve learning only when classes provide a learner-oriented teaching with less teacher’s control over the use of multimedia components (e.g., So & Kong, 2007).

Thus, the exploration and the teacher’s support lead students to activate congruent mental models in order to develop adequate degrees of consciousness and improving metacognitive engagement in the use of media.

As Schär and Kaiser (2006) pointed out, media must be evaluated in order to the learning goals one wish to achieve. The focus question is not whether one learns by the mean of multimedia, rather what kind of knowledge can be gained depending on the structure and the representation of the information (verbal, visual, kinetic, reticular, linear, etc.).

As already mentioned, the diffusion of a medium does not correspond to an actual knowledge about it. The search for the best performing instrument often goes with an under-measuring of the real use (see Figure 1). There is the need for a deeper literacy which has to concern both technical aspects and procedures4 and consciousness about the instrument and its potentialities. If medium has a value in itself — maybe because of the structure of the information provided — school and society should not be focused just on the most recent releases, but also to those kinds of media almost forgotten at school (radio, TV, etc.).

Media tools and cognitive skills Children and adolescents spend a lot of time in front of television and computer: they are passive in the irst case and use computer almost mainly for socialising and 3

4

Someone will remind that in the ‘90s teachers used to build hypertexts and hypermedia: nobody used them to study, not even in the other classes. Those products did not represent an instrument to improve learning in themselves, they just served as an exercise on the hypertextual structure.

Many students fail the basic operations on the computer: they are very good in the use of certain applications (e-mails, messanger, net surfing, etc.), but often use software as excel, word, power point or images software to a smaller extent compared to their potentialities (hypertextual links, keyboard shortcuts, etc.).

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play purposes. In most cases the use of media is not a critical one. That is why overexposure is often perceived as risky by parents and educators.

Researches showed that attention skills are not affected by technologies on their own, rather by the activity promoted. An exposure — even a not protracted one — to tools that do not activate the user affects attention processes. Thus, for instance, television induces worst effects compared to computer (Guarnieri, Fabio & Antonietti, 2005).

The use of multimedia tools affects the kind of reasoning activated and the structure of information acquired. According to the structure of the tool, the user could be more or less facilitated at identifying peculiar organisations, internal connections, ampler bounds, information previously acquired, etc. (Antonietti & Cantoia, 2000).

At the light of the action that the exposure to a particular medium has on the user, in the teaching/learning process is fundamental to take care on one side of the coherence between the instructional intention and the choice of the medium; on the other side of making the functions involved in the use of each different tool explicit.

Any tool really contextualised in the instructional project is useful in the learning process. The coherence of the whole learning process calls forth another core aspect, which is assessment. In order to identify the effects of the use of a tool, one can not set aside the practices usually accomplished at school and the extent to which they are integrated with respect to the work carried out with the tool itself. In this sense, even the motivation issue, often mentioned to justify the educational use of media, gets a different weight depending on the habit to use education technologies in the school experience: students will react differently if they use media in isolated events or in a continuative way.

In this contribution we have tried to give some evidence to a core question: students and teachers need to explore and to better know media by the mean of a conscious, metacognitive approach in order to draw their best potentialities. On the other side, media tools have to be integrated in the instructional project in order to give their best performances.

To sum all these points, we can refer to the bi-circular bi-directional framework

by Antonietti and Colombo (2008). The use of media is affected in a circular way by personal and social beliefs and by the criteria that everyone deines in order to assess their effects. In both cases, mental models and more or less adequate beliefs which affect approaches, intentions, expectations and strategies are put at stake. Those processes take place both in the student and teacher’s mind. In order to implement, a signiicant learning/teaching process the single visions have to meet sharing one language, one project, common references.

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Mithologies about induces to realize

Need/Goal Personal criteria to evaluate the

Effect

Mental model of the

Tool

Use suggest

depend on the way of conceptualising the

Beliefs about the relevant

Figure 1 Bi-circular bi-directional framework (Antonietti & Colombo, 2008).

References Antonietti, A., & Cantoia, M. (2001). Apprendere con il computer. Trento: Erickson.

Antonietti, A., & Cantoia, M. (2000). To see a painting versus to walk in a painting: An experiment on sense-making through virtual reality. Computer and Education, 34, 213-223.

Antonietti, A., & Cantoia, M. (2009). Media and learning. What can cognitive psychology suggest to multimedial education? REM – Research on Education and Media, 1 (1), 47-62.

Antonietti, A., & Colombo, B. (2008). Computer-supported learning tools: A bi-circular bidirectional framework. New Ideas in Psychology, 26, 120-142.

Antonietti, A., & Giorgetti, M. (2003). La rappresentazione delle potenzialità del computer per l’apprendimento. In A. Antonietti, A. Calcaterra, B. Colombo, & M. Giorgetti, Attorno al computer (pp. 48-63). Roma: Carocci.

Guarnieri, A., Fabio, R.A., & Antonietti, A. (2005). I media culturali e i giovani. Proili d’uso.

Roma: Carocci.

Istat (2008). Italia in cifre. Roma: Csr.

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McNamara, D.S., & Shapiro, A.M. (2005). Multimedia and hypermedia solutions for promoting Metacognitive engagement, coherence and learning. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 33 (1), 1-29.

Sch채r, S.G., & Kaiser, J. (2006). Revising (multi-)Media learning principles by applying a differentiated knowledge concept. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 64 (10), 1061-1070.

So, W.-M.W., & Kong, S.-C. (2007). Approaches to inquiry learning with Multimedia resources in primary classrooms. Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching, 26 (4), 329-354.

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Sud-Est: Technology and guidance Maria Grazia Celentano*

ABSTRACT

Department of Pedagogic, Psychological and Educational Science, University of Salento, Via Stampacchia, 43 – 73100 Lecce. E-mail: mariagrazia.celentano@unile.it

How can new technologies be used to activate integrated, effective and eficient vocational guidance services? Nowadays, social and cultural changes have led to a change in the vocational guidance model able to meet the developmental needs/requirements of the various subjects. The educational task ascribed to vocational guidance can be accomplished only by taking initiatives capable of leaving a mark on the process of creation of personal identity. Guiding means allowing the subject to develop the ability to read his/her own aspirations, environmental messages, to make choices and decisions, whilst having all useful information at their inger tips. Today, technologies and communication/integration tools can favour the process of creation of the identity and boost the ability of orientation in a complex reality. The present article presents the results of an interesting research activity (SudEst project) that has developed a new vocational guidance methodology and tools along with an informative system for the social management of information resources. An effective communication bridge encouraging relationships between schools, universities, families and groups has been created thanks to the use of Web 2.0 logic. A telecommunication platform has been developed in order to involve students and de-

* Thanks to prof. Salvatore Colazzo for his guidance in the drafting of this article.

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velop their interests and aptitudes, to assist them cultivating their meeting, confrontation and communication skills.

Keywords: vocational guidance; inter-institutional cooperation.

Introduction The problems of vocational guidance when choosing university studies, of the analysis of educational requirements, of the elaboration of competences, of the phenomenon of the giving up study or university failure have always urged the scientiic community to focus its attention on the general matters of vocational guidance and its various applications. The debate on vocational guidance and even more on the necessity to develop appropriate communication strategies, both in a lifelong learning context and in a university-limited perspective is more and more lively and articulate.

Certainly, there are many projects and activities carried out to favour / support university vocational guidance or more speciically the training, the self-evaluation and the evaluation of skills and knowledge. These activities have very often been changed during marketing campaigns in order to increase the number of matriculations.

For a long time researchers have thought about the real sense of a vocational guidance operation. A lot has been done in order to create new professions (such as the vocational guidance counsellors) and to underline its “educational value”. Up to the 80s, two formulations stressing, on one side, the “diagnostic” nature of vocational activities and, on the other, the spread of information prevailed. When vocational guidance was conceived as an active action useful to direct young people towards the correct place, information has been used to enable a wiser choice. Nowadays vocational guidance is considered an educational action aiming at enabling young people to orientate themselves in a complex reality. Greater attention is attributed to the person and to what regards the care for educational guidance, tutoring and counselling.

The starting point to stress the social development and the moral construction of the individual inserted in a speciic social context was surely given to us in 1970 by a committee of experts from UNESCO who claimed that: «Vocational guidance consists in making the individual able to become aware of his/her own personal characteristics and to develop them in view of his/her study and work choices in every circumstance of his/her life, while devoting him/herself to serve the society and improve his/her own responsibilities» (Guichard & Huteau, 2003); therefore, the interpersonal activities we live and confrontation with others have an educational value and contribute to the creation of the individual identity (Colazzo, 2008).

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Vocational guidance means promotion of personal development in a social context (Perucca, 2002a). That is to say, that each subject is unique in his/her kind; each subject has his/her own identity or rather he/she has various identities, created to react to the many facets of the reality we live in. Nowadays, the reality is very complex, very rich in stimuli, proposals, resources and surely “choosing” is not an easy task. Educating to choose is undoubtedly the major objective of a vocational guidance activity. The question is to establish an educational path able to ensure the individual the ability to read his/her own inner universe and to create his/her own personal identity, in order for the creation of the “self” to be the result of deeply experienced life training and not of extemporaneous choices. (Paparella, 2002a).

The question of vocational guidance must be expressed both in terms of responsibilities and tasks of each actor involved at all levels (secondary school, university, families, groups, etc.) and in terms of the single individual who orientates him/herself resorting to his/her own capacities, motivations, level of self-consciousness and the level of the awareness of the reality ahead.

Talking about the vocational guidance when accessing the university world, the target is deinite. These individuals have diverse motivations, interests and competences; they do not have clear projects for their life; they do not have a complete vision of the world or the place their project for their life occupies in the world, therefore they can make no coherent decisions. Choosing means being aware of one’s own identity, character, personal skills and resources within a wide and diverse reality.

Vocational guidance specialists are asked to consider vocational guidance as a model to put the individual and his/her needs at the centre of a broader plan. It is a complex process in which it is not the adult to ‘guide’, but it is the young person that guides him/ herself (Paparella, 2002b). Thanks to vocational guidance activities, they can develop their skills and competences to recognise and appreciate their own resources, aptitudes and skills to look constructively at the world, read the context and social expectations.

Deinitely, it is not easy to establish in detail what the vocational guidance tasks and activities are in a university context affected by great changes, above all in recent years.

In order to guide it is necessary to aim strategically at: – a greater use of knowledge and information that can simplify the vocational guidance process in decision-making processes; – a more adequate knowledge of the study environment chosen: very often the choice made by young people is not suitable because the study environment does not correspond to the image they have; – socialisation: the need to take initiatives to favour the student’s insertion in new environments. The promotion of cultural initiatives, meetings or moments of local society collective life can favour numerous contacts with the environment.

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From this viewpoint, technology can help the vocational guidance process a lot, favouring the removal of space and time barriers that have prevented young people from approaching new worlds. Virtual round tables with university lecturers and exstudents of the school, for instance, can allow the illustration of the characteristics of the university, university studies and university courses as well as the clariication of any doubts. Virtual visits to university facilities — for example during exam sessions or lectures — can be planned in order to enable young people to participate in the university environment actively; thus in a progressive deinition of their interests and a gradual understanding of their motivations. If nowadays the web is considered an ideal meeting place where it is possible to exchange ideas, meet new people and socialise, universities can be easily seen as “virtual socialisation places” to stimulate students to discussion, communication with various users, creation of communities (that sharing the same interests can lead at the same time to the creation of the “Self”), the development of one’s own identity.

If “acceptance”, “exercise”, “planning” and “participation” are the educational categories on which the identity of the Self is based (Paparella, 2002a), then right at this historic moment, that could be called social networking, it is necessary to act on the need to participate felt by young people: the need to participate in social life, community life and the creation of their own identity. Social networking tools can allow people to discover themselves and at the same time, other people having the same interests, through contact networks (Celentano & Colazzo, 2008).

At present, the vocational guidance services addressed to students of secondary schools and provided by the various universities are mainly organised in information interventions about the typology of educational, professional and employment possibilities; in the use of tools for the surveying of aptitudes and interests through diagnostic, projection and prediction tests; in meetings and debates or conferences, and inally in face-to-face consultation. The technologies supporting these activities have been used above all to offer cognitive data or information elaborated and administered taking into account the characteristics of the individual who interprets it; to develop a software for the analysis of interests, aptitudes, personality and consequently for the building of the user proile or to promote the personal knowledge of the subject — elaboration of the competence balance. Nevertheless, nowadays the progressive diffusion of the use of ICT among teenagers, along with the use of communication and interaction tools developed following Web 2.0 logic, can favour the process of creation of identity and as a consequence inluence decision-making skills, if they are well planned and integrated; indeed, the innovative elements that mark this new web are the new information production model and the great enhancement of the social dimension of the web, thanks to the adoption of tools able to make the interaction between individuals easier as well as to facilitate their transformation 176

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in active service creators (Celentano & Colazzo, 2008). As regards the information dimension of the vocational guidance activity, it is opportune to focus the attention on the knowledge resource participative construction process that cannot be identiied with the simple institutional information offer about educational offers; it must be identiied with its construction made by individuals. As far as the social dimension of the web is concerned, community relationships will be particularly important, rather than network relationships. In the community, heterogeneous individuals get in touch with each other and overcome the traditional differences at a higher level, the level of the sense of belonging, which give light to different forms of support, solidarity and a very close bond of affection between the individual and the community he/she belongs to (Colazzo, 2008).

Technology represents a valuable aid not only for the activation of an effective “communication and relation bridge between different worlds” (school, university, education, work services), but above all to boost the manifestation of the individual’s desires and motivations to be compared with aptitudes, skills and potentials, while recognising ties and objective points of strength deriving from the background of an individual integrated in a community.

Acknowledging that a “correctly” organised and implemented guidance intervention has the task of helping the individual to make autonomous and conscious decisions (Di Fabio, 1998) and that the vocational guidance activity has important educational value (Piccolboni, 2001), the Sud-Est project has elaborated and developed a telecommunications platform able to make a common communication project drawn up by the various institutions involved visible. The project has been launched in order to communicate with young people and intercept their educational needs, offering the most suitable solutions in order to meet them. The project aims also at exploring the student’s behavioural characteristics, his/her skills as well as competences (Di Fabio, 1998).

The Sud-Est project considers that the web potentials and tools can actually favour the birth of a community of pupils attending the last year of secondary school who share the same needs, and university students attending the irst years of a university course, in order to offer valuable help when choosing the study course to begin.

The Sud-Est project In 2007, the University of Salento started off a theoretical study propaedeutic to the planning and implementation of an information system for the vocational guidance of pupils attending the last two years of secondary schools in the region of Salento, in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts of Lecce and the Academy of Music 177

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“Tito Schipa” of Lecce. The project, that has been directed and supervised by Prof.

Nicola Paparella, has also resorted to the collaboration of Prof Salvatore Colazzo.

The project has many complex objectives and has foreseen the creation of a communication network between students and post-secondary institutions — University, Academy of Fine Arts and Academy of Music — among the other results, through the implementation of a telecommunication platform open to all actors involved.

It is a user-centred web application that, thanks to the integration of the new web 2.0 tools, is able to: – favour the creation of a community of actively involved users; – facilitate the creation and the sharing of a distributed knowledge base; – make the most of the resources of the territory and the educational offer in the region of Salento.

The project experiments, according to Web 2.0 logic, a new information production model, which makes the most of the social dimension of the network, thanks to the adoption of tools able to facilitate the interaction between individuals and their transformation in active service creators. The more users will use those services, the higher their quality will be, in accordance with McFedries (2006).

Through the creation of a virtual community made of subjects who interact and cooperate, the project has favoured the creation of a new knowledge-base different from the structured and hierarchical organisation of information given by institutional sites.

For example, tools for the participation in virtual lectures have been used as a tool to diffuse and make the practices and the activities of each educational body known.

Information, multimedia contents and specially elaborated interaction tools instead, are used to proile the user and explore his/her inclination towards his/her choice.

The project studies and implements a new database, that is an evolved knowledge management system able to gather and revise the data that are useful to proile the user correctly, through the administration of multimedia questions elaborated following the IQ model in small doses, the identiication of the user’s behaviour and the use of automatic and/or semi-automatic tools for the deduction of implicit knowledge.

Besides education bodies the project has foreseen the active involvement of student associations, as they allow aggregating university community life experiences; of families called to intervene in the school choices of their children; of teachers and vocational guidance psychologists who have contributed in the deinition of the rules and procedures necessary to evaluate the users aptitudes.

The project regarded speciically: – the creation of synergies between the University of Lecce, the University of Macerata, the Academy of ine Arts and the Academy of Music of Lecce in order to: 178

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exchange experiences in the ield of vocational guidance; plan new and effective communication systems for the vocational guidance; implement those systems; transform the established synergies in something more structured and continuous; – the promotion of the active participation of students, who are not only users but also actors in the vocational guidance communication; – the involvement of secondary schools for the implementation of a synergic and integrated action.

The system has been designed as an evolution of a knowledge management system; indeed, it is able to collect, classify, integrate, process and distribute data and information produced by the community; but also to favour the decentralisation of the sources of information, peer-to-peer resource sharing, direct access to knowledge materials, creation and management of the knowledge elaborated jointly by the various actors giving particular importance to users, to their work and the community itself. In order to proile users, the use of the following tools has been hypothesised: – the use of forms of administration of questions that are more in accordance with the web environment; – the development of alternative strategies, able to make classiications automatically, minimising the intervention of operators and subsequent costs and exploiting the information that can be obtained from the system interaction schemes carried out by each student; – the request of a feedback from secondary school teachers, as they are in direct contact with students.

Implementation and project aspects For the deinition of requisites, the identiication of stakeholders — those who are interested in the application — and related objectives, of project ties and usage scenarios, the AWARE methodology – Analysis of Web Application Requirement — (Bolchini & Paolini, 2004), one of the most used methods for web applications, has been used; therefore, the following stakeholder categories have been identiied: – stakeholders (not users): faculties and university courses, secondary education institutions, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Academy of Music, the project team, families; – users: pupils attending the last year of a secondary school, university students and staff responsible for the vocational guidance, student organisations.

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Speciically: • The pupil attending the last year of secondary school is the privileged beneiciary of the system. All the facilities and the services have been designed to guide the user when choosing the most suitable educational body — faculty, the Academy of Fine Arts or the Academy of Music”. A username and a password is issued to each pupil attending the last two years of secondary school in the province of Lecce in order to have access to the reserved areas of the system. The system is accessible through the browser and allows the user to: – have access to all of the information contents available in the portal; – interact with other users thanks to synchronous and asynchronous communication tools; – register for events organised by educational bodies or student associations; – insert comments and opinions about news and events in which he/she has participated; – share knowledge and experiences (even in a multimedia way) through participation in virtual communities; – answer questions about vocational guidance; – examine the vocational guidance proile formulated by the system and compare it with the one elaborated by his/her vocational guidance teacher.

• The university student uses the system to share his/her own university experience with other users. He/She can have access to information contents regarding various educational institutions and by previous registration he/she can also: – join events promoted through the system; – request registration with an association; – have access to the synchronous and asynchronous communication tools; – share experiences and contents with other users.

• The university professor, being the person responsible for the various faculties, has the task of arranging the vocational guidance questions as well as the multimedia contents of the represented body.

• The vocational guidance referent appointed by the secondary school has the task of: – formulating a vocational guidance assessment for each pupil; – evaluating the effectiveness of the information system by illing in assessment reports; – examining the vocational guidance proiles elaborated by the system after having analysed the answers to the questions, the student-to-student behaviours and student-to-system interaction; – organising events in cooperation with the educational bodies, always with the objective of promoting the educational offer of the region of Salento or the involvement of families in school activities.

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• The student organisations have the task of organising and promoting events and sponsoring their own activities.

• Faculties — with their university courses —, the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Music participate in the project to promote their own educational offer, by organising and promoting events, by preparing and publishing multimedia contents.

The contents and services offered by the application, the information structure and navigation architecture have been elaborated by adapting the conceptual planning model proposed by IDM to speciic exigencies. The research activity has led to the deinition of three different elements: topic (a potential communication topic between the user and the application); the relevant relations (relevant relations between topics) and the group of topic.

Topic are: – information charts describing the educational offer of the various faculties; – events advertisements; – user comments on events; – description of educational experiences published by university students — including multimedia contents; – educational bodies’ presentations; – forms created to describe the proile of pupils attending their last year of secondary school; – messages exchange between users; – information about contacts and project group proile.

It is necessary to highlight that, at a planning level, in order to give a detailed description of some of the topics mentioned, it has been necessary to differentiate topics in single topic and multiple topic to specify what can be a conversation topic between the user and the application and what represents a category of potential conversation topics respectively.

As regards the web channel planning activity, the detailed structure of information and navigation mechanisms offered by the various user typologies has been designed to interact with contents in an effective way.

Conclusions At present the Sud-Est systemis in the stage of implementation. The dimensional estimates regarding the body of users are made taking into account the number of secondary education institutions present in the province of Lecce and the number of pupils attending the last two years of secondary school, the number of the students of 181

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the University of Salento and the number of people responsible for giving vocational guidance. They show that the project has seen the involvement of some: – 45,000 pupils attending the last year of secondary school – 14,000 university students – 755 teachers – 60 university professors – 151 secondary education institutions – 10 faculties – 72 university courses The results have been an annual production of 75 GB of multimedia contents — audio, video and images — elaborated by the various faculties and some 1,800 GB (1.8 TB) produced by users.

The Sud-Est project has tangibly succeeded in: – promoting a more effective inter-institutional cooperation with the aim of implementing a common vocational guidance path with secondary schools; – actively involving schools and respective spokespeople in the vocational guidance activities; – offering a valuable support to carefully choose the university study course to begin, to the pupils attending the last two years of secondary school; – putting at the disposal of the university, the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Music a tool for the enhancement of the educational offer and the development of information and consulting activities; – developing an innovative and stimulating system of interaction between pupils attending the last year of secondary school and university students.

The offer of those services is part of a more complex and organised project in which the University of Salento is actively involved, for: – the establishment of appropriate vocational guidance methodologies and tools; – the development of integrated information systems based on the use of new technologies; – the social management of information resources; – the promotion and diffusion of vocational guidance services and products.

Also at a planning level, the Sud-Est project has made use of innovative planning models and methodologies renowned at an international level because they are able to focus the attention on the design process, apart from the technology that can be used to implement contents, the user interface, the interaction or the logic of the system.

The innovative nature of the system derives not only from the developed tools but also from the adaptation of a speciic design model (Bolchini & Paolini, 2006) for 182

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the planning of an interactive/multimedia/multi-channel information system able to encourage the sharing of knowledge and experiences with the objective, amongst others, to guide pupils in the gradual identiication of their study and work objectives, and the recognition of their skills, capabilities and aptitudes.

References Bolchini, D., & Paolini, P. (2006). Interactive Dialogue Model: a Design Technique for MultiChannel Applications. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 8 (3), 529-541.

Bolchini, D., & Paolini, P. (2004). Goal-Driven Requirements Analysis for Hypermediaintensive Web Applications. Requirements Engineering Journal, 9, 85-103.

Celentano, M.G., & Colazzo, S. (2008). L’apprendimento digitale. Prospettive tecnologiche e pedagogiche dell’e-learning. Roma: Carocci.

Colazzo, S. (Ed.) (2008). Progettazione e valutazione dell’intervento formativo. Milano: McGraw-Hill.

Di Fabio, A. (1998). Psicologia dell’orientamento. Problemi, metodi e strumenti. Firenze: Giunti.

Guichard, J., & Huteau, M. (2003). Psicologia dell’orientamento professionale. Teorie e pratiche per orientare la scelta negli studi e nelle professioni. Milano: Cortina.

McFedries, P. (2006). Technically Speaking: Folk Wisdom. IEEE Spectrum, 43 (2), 80.

Paparella, N. (2002a). La scelta di sé fra miti e mode. In A. Perucca (Ed.). L’orientamento tra miti mode e grandi silenzi (pp. 27-42). Castrignano dei Greci: Amaltea.

Paparella, N. (2002b). L’orientamento nella ricerca scientiica e nella prassi scolastica. In A. Perucca (Ed.). L’orientamento tra miti mode e grandi silenzi (pp.155-165). Castrignano dei Greci: Amaltea.

Perucca, A. (2002a). Progetto di sé e costruzione dell’identità. In A. Perucca (Ed.). L’orientamento tra miti mode e grandi silenzi (pp. 11-26). Castrignano dei Greci: Amaltea.

Perucca, A. (2002b). Autonomia dell’università e cultura dell’orientamento. In A. Perucca (Ed.). L’orientamento tra miti mode e grandi silenzi (pp. 321-333). Castrignano dei Greci: Amaltea.

Piccolboni, G. (2001). La scelta della facoltà. Monitoraggio e valutazione di un’esperienza di orientamento universitario. Verona: Mazziana.

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Otranto in the Middle Ages Research and urban reconstruction for edutainment Luigi Oliva*, Giovanni Alosio** e Lucio T. De Paolis**

ABSTRACT

* ISUFI – University of Salento. E-mail: luigi.oliva@isufi.unile.it ** Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento, Via per Monteroni – 73100 Lecce.

E-mail: giovanni.aloisio@unisalento.it; lucio.depaolis@unisalento.it

Virtual reality applications on cultural heritage are increasing, in line with a general trend towards virtual reproduction and interaction mediated by computer systems. The effects of this trend both on education and research are still far from having been completely tested and deined.

The Mediaevo project aims to develop a multi-channel and multi-sensory platform for edutainment in cultural heritage towards integration of human sciences and new data processing technologies (ICT) for the realization of a digital didactic game oriented towards the knowledge of medieval history and society.

During the project it has been possible to test the possible interactions between historical research, morphological inquiries, data management systems and the deinition of a virtual immersive platform for playing and educating. The platform has also proved to be a means for validating hypotheses and indings formulated by researchers.

This article introduces the theoretical questions related to the educative use of ICT and describes the steps of the reconstruction of the town of Otranto in the Middle Ages: data collection and integration, the organization of the work and software applications.

Keywords: urban environment; cultural heritage; virtual reality; educational game; interaction.

Edizioni Erickson – Trento

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History in a bit. Open questions and perspectives It’s a widely held point of view that cultural heritage is diminishing continuously. While new treasures emerge from places previously unexplored or ignored, a larger number of buildings and sites are compromised by natural or human action. This process leads to the demise of important historical documents and artistic goods.

The improvement of our technological capabilities enriches the possibilities for research and protection and enhances the value of cultural heritage, thus halting their demise. Firstly, the increased speed of communication and data exchange within the research community offers the dimension of real time interconnectivity. Secondly, the overall amount of information originating from both qualitative and quantitative exploration with the support of technologically advanced equipment, compared with that of a few decades ago, leads to the possibility of an extremely detailed description of reality. The systems for cataloguing and managing these data have been structured with complex and ontological1 categories that deine common protocols for enhancing classiication and comparison even among distant users. Finally, the element which constitutes the overall sign of the times, are the possibilities presented by the means for a realistic representation of everything that comes from research, from the hyper sensorial reproduction of reality to the reconstruction of different hypotheses and scenarios.

The expansion of these means necessitates a contextual disciplinary revision, of interest to all those in the ield of humanistic studies. Historians cannot afford to buck the trend to a post-literary dimension of knowledge transmission or knowledge itself (Rosenstone, 1995). The new phase of contemporary civilization has been deined post-modern or, more correctly, post-historic (Baudrillard, 1992), for the predominance of representation and hard virtualization of reality.2 Evolution in research methodology corresponds to a general debate on communication and education closely linked to the characteristics of a changing perception of teaching, oscillating between experimental impulses and conservative attitudes (De Kerckhove, 1993; Morganti & Riva, 2006; Borgatti et al., 2004).

1

2

In computer science, the term ontology refers to a «conceptualization towards a structure of categories and data that contains classes, relations and other elements for a given domain. This structure is defined using semantic languages related to the formal logic» (Gruber, 1993).

Almost forty years ago, Jean Baudrillard, announced the end of the historic era and the beginning of a not well defined “post” context, in which there is no distinction between reality and representation. From his perspective, hyperrealism is much more attractive than realism, the virtual world is going to overcome reality, simulacra are going to be better than things. And this will be the common perception of future people until the limit of perception that is death.

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The historic town. Research, representation and education Studying a town and its historic landscape involves different methods of analysis, interpretation and communication using digital technologies. Geographical Information System (GIS), remote sensing, laser scanning, photogrammetry, computer vision, 3D modelling, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are instruments of a multidisciplinary system that links historical knowledge, structural recognition, geotopography, geology, sociology, urban and architectonic analysis, engineering and graphic skills.

The ancient town, as an information unit, can be deined as a meme (Dawkins, 1976), a cultural unit code that locates and describes the process of territorialization of human society. It is the space-time relation between man and environment at a certain time (Forte, 2003).3 The virtual reconstruction of a historical landscape is divided in ive levels (Pescarin, 2009, pp. 21-23). The irst level (Archaeological Landscape) regards all the information coming from physical measurement (we can call it Realscape). The second level is the Interpreted Landscape or Mapscape that is deined by the systematic organization of data. The third one is the hypothesis of a possible landscape in the past (Ancient Potential Landscape o Pastscape). The fourth level involves the experience of historical context through a process of immersion which deines contemporary perceptions. With the aid of the social sciences this leads to the deinition of Perceived Landscape or Mindscape. The inal level is the Webscape, the grid of outer relations and communication that is useful to test the process and collect the necessary feedback.

Until recently, the “historic vision� was limited to only a few professionals, scholars and researchers, who share the interpretation codes for extracting the ancient landscape from the actual one. In this new stream of experimentation, geared towards interaction and edutainment, the researcher inally becomes part of a system through which to study and interpret space. In a virtual interactive town, the possibilities of information exchange increase dramatically from static reconstruction to simulation.

Simulation allows the construction of a platform that adds the deinition of game rules and plots to interaction and immersion. This allows players to easily experience and recognize topographical and temporal coordinates of virtual space. In this way the past is actualized with real behaviours, producing at the same time, the vision of 3

The complexity of such a scenario suggests the absence of a holistic approach to the question, in order to experience contradiction and dialectic of opposites. But the educational purpose of the work needs a perceivable synthesis of culture, civilization and place.

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pastscape and mindscape in the virtual reality built on realscape and related to the mapscape.

The inal goal of the deinition of the historic landscape is the cybernetic world that will create ininite possible simulations, not necessarily bonded to physical reality, based on the informatics rules that encode the understanding of ancient situations.4

The experience of the interactive reconstruction of historical contexts The methodological and disciplinary peculiarities concerning VR have opened up new possibilities within disciplines which have led on, in the space of only a few years, to develop distinct characters of their own. Now days, we speak of virtual archaeology, virtual architecture, virtual town planning and so on, indicating that part of the discipline which is closely linked to material contexts and specialized in the reconstruction or veriication of classical assumptions or of new hypotheses. The pure humanistic disciplines (history, philosophy, etc.) are still some way from this point. Their contribution, however, is fundamental in order to validate all the work in this environment.

In the work of reconstructing historical or archaeological landscapes, extensive experimentation takes place on the net or has been presented during the course of international conferences. These primarily concern the elaboration of algorithmic models in order to better comprehend and reconstruct the sites, technological applications for AR applied to cultural heritage and ontological systems and data management.

An example of activity in the ields closest to the object of the present research is the work of the Institute for Architectural and Monumental Heritage (Istituto per i Beni Archeologici e Monumentali) which has produced various reconstructions of the city of Metaponto (in the province of Matera) and of Muro Leccese (in the province of Lecce) and the monasteries of Santa Maria di Cerrate (province of Lecce) and Jure Vetere in the Medieval Age (Fonseca et al., 2007, pp. 87-132). The reconstruction of the site of Faragola (province of Foggia) by the University of Foggia, undertaken as part of the project Itinera (http://www.itinera.puglia.it/) and known as Time Machine, its within the trend of an experiential relationship within an archaeological context.

Other applications facilitate access to and reading of the cultural patrimony both within the museum and online. Progetto Appia Antica (CNR-ITAB), the Progetto 4

A possible circular cybernetic schema created for the historical landscape starts with the acquisition of data, following on with their interpretation, validation, interaction, feedback, cultural transmission or communication, sharing within the virtual community and finally arriving at their concretization or enaction (Forte, 2009).

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Virtual Rome, Muvi (a virtual museum dealing with daily life in the 20th century) and the Nu.M.E. Project (a virtual museum concerned with the city of Bologna) (Bocchi, 2005) are all to be considered prominent examples of experience relating to the latter.

On a strongly interactive level and related speciically to multichannel edutainment, examples of applications utilizing Virtual Collaborative Environments (CVEs) are found in the platform City Cluster (http://www.fabricat.com/CITYCL_WEB2003/ CITYCLUSTER.html) (this permits the user to share in a virtual visit of various cities), the Quest Atlantis Project (http://atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu/) (for teaching about archaeological contexts) and Integrated Technologies of Robotics and Virtual Environment in Archaeology Project (http://www.vhlab.itabc.cnr.it/FIRB/Release/Home. html ) (this latter indicates a more professional use of VR interaction aimed not only at information dissemination but also scientiic examination).

Reconstructing for fun. The Mediaevo project The present experience conirms that information technology presents a new and dynamic tool with which to approach the study and the communication of studies into an historical city.

The project “MediaEvo: Development of a multichannel and multisensory edutainment platform for the study of cultural heritage” (http://www.mediaevo.unifg.it; De Paolis et al., 2009) constitutes part of an experimental phase of work. Through a reconstruction of 13th century Otranto (a city in the province of Lecce), the videogame MediaEvo creates a learning interface aimed at facilitating learning in the area of history, culture and daily life in medieval society.

The project has the aim of investigating new interfaces and learning models — new applications for Information and Communication Technology (ITC) — within two macro areas of interest, human sciences and engineering. Cutting-edge tools such as blogs, wikis, social software, semantic web are integrated circuits for educationinformation-communication and the construction of knowledge about cultural patrimony.

Planning for the project has built upon experience accumulated in previous research related to videogames and learning (Kebritchi & Hirumi, 2008) and performance experience as a means for stimulating learning (Paras & Bizzocchi, 2005).

The project has considered the creative potential of play both in cultural terms and as a fundamental element for deciphering/comprehending material relations in such a way as to connect it to the perceptual-motor sphere, or that which operates with prevalence in constructing knowledge. The inherent risk which has emerged 189

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from this operation is the contraction of homo ludens (Huizinga, 1939), from a structuralist perspective, within homo videns (Sartori, 2000). If, on one hand, a requisite for learning through play is that an individual is able act upon that which they perceive and that their action produce the result that it would in a real situation, on the other, it’s necessary to avoid incursions into the anti-educational paradox of emotional identiication running the risk of erasing understanding (Ginzburg, 2006).

In deining the game medium, it was considered useful to go for emotional control and the critical distance applicable to virtual reality, to the point of including the concept of estrangement (Sklovskij, 1966), in order to avoid the supericial effects of numbing or overload (Tanoni, 2003). Such actions are introduced into the MediaEvo platform by controlling hyperrealism, the management of time and the modalities by which the cognitive experience mediates the coniguration of the artiicial intelligence, the management of relationships between characters, the interfaces for communication and more detailed enquiry, expressiveness, etc.

The development of the project is based upon the principle of “media ecology” (Calvani, 2001; Postman, 1981), conirming that education using the media implies an essential education in media. While this primarily concerns the inal user and educator it does not exclude the developer or researcher who have an active part to play in development and the stimulation of new intelligence.

Otranto, a city in the hotseat The city of Otranto was identiied as a unique and eloquent historical setting for the project. Although the speciic ield of research was focused on the late middle ages, the project is set in a site which has been densely inhabited since before the 7th century BCE and which conserves the signs of the previous cultural stratiications.

The project leaves open the possibility for further work on other historical phases with the prospect of developing a complete “time machine”.

Through its art, spatial relationships and landscape, Otranto provides evidence of the close contact between Mediterranean cultures, particularly those of western Roman Catholicism, Byzantium and Islam. The year considered representative for the medieval reconstruction is 1227 — the year in which Emperor Frederick II of Swabia and his court entered the city for the irst time to embark for the Sixth Crusade.

From the analysis of the moments and documents, numerous useful points which facilitate the multicultural experience emerge to enrich the educative platform of immediate reference.

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Otranto was oficially a bilingual city. Together with Latin, Byzantine Greek was oficially spoken by the archbishop during religious celebrations and both languages were taught at San Nicola di Casole — one of the great centres of cultural conservation and diffusion known as the scriptoria. Being a maritime and mercantile city, the languages of the populace were many and varied. Throughout its history, Otranto has been settled by populations which have affected their inluence on the city on both an historical and artistic level (Houben, 2007; Houben, 2008).

This cultural melting pot produced a particular mix of knowledge and traditions, still recognizable in some of the customs, handcrafts, igurative art and in the articulation of space in Otranto. Interaction in a local context of this kind cannot but represent situations which resonate with the great themes of medieval civilization, in a sort of tiny virtual encyclopaedia.

The phases of the reconstruction Data acquisition For the general topographic data, information was gathering using digital terrain models (DTM), thematic maps (technical, hydrological, nautical, choropleth, IGM), aerial photographs and all the local and regional maps and plans available. Fixed ield reference points or coordinates were established and a data collection campaign undertaken which primarily concerned roadways, city walls, monuments and parts thereof, and building lines (mapscape).

Both published and unpublished data from archaeological excavations (Michaelides & Wilkinson, 1992; D’Andria & Whitehouse, 1992) were included in the topographical framework, distinguishing the stratigraphy of the period of interest.

All the material was digitalised, standardised and catalogued in order to create a virtual outline of the actual situation (realscape). A process of reverse stratigraphy was underway in order to reproduce the conditions of 1227.

As far as concerns historical documentation, Otranto presents a scarcity of direct historical sources, among which very few provided information which was useful in the reconstruction. A catalogue was compiled of notable historical maps, both descriptive and technical, including perspective views (Figure 1) and undeveloped project plans.

Data interpretation With no archaeological excavations or other explorative works in course, numerous gaps regarding the urban layout and the location of buildings, monuments and 191

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Figure 1

View of Otranto: Idruntum Civitas Apuliae. Giacomo Filippo da Bergamo, Supplemento Chronicarum, Venice 1490, c.256.

known functional reference points were illed in through a historical analysis of the urban and architectural landscape in order to establish a spatial hierarchy, the urban centre, the dimension of lots, the typological distribution, etc (Caniggia & Maffei, 1979) (Figure 2).

The material elements were compared with analogous situations in neighbouring areas or cities and topological-functional modular grids were produced for the buildings, objects, clothes and activities (Figure 3).

The setting for the historical period in question has been deined based on these data and is updated in real time, as new detail is added and the level of understanding enriched.

The creation of the urban landscape Based on the published treatises and characteristics identiied in local sources, an idea of the city as a practical context for the expression of the urban socio-cultural 192

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Otranto in the Middle Ages

Figure 2

Basic residential modules.

values was deined (mindscape) (Figure 4).

The following contexts were identiied: – religious (the diocesan structure concentrated in the cathedralbell tower-square and in other sacred places); – infrastructure (the hierarchy and function of various axes and the identification of a central city gate-square-city gate system and the mediating connections); – defensive (the city walls and service areas, the castle); – mercantile (trade functions and the structures for economic ac-

Figure 3

Aerial photograph of Otranto and study of the urban plan.

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– –

– – –

tivity: commerce, distribution and warehousing); intermodal (the port, the regional arterial roads); extra-urban (the areas of expansion, non urban functions: monasteries, storage areas, production facilities); residential (neighbourhood settlement patterns); handcrafts (activity); family.

Figure 4

Aerial view of an urban area in the reconstructive phase.

The landscape/context relationship represents an ontological unit, the meme, in which to orient and deine the educational experience.

The 3D model and the driver of the game A series of tests focused on the creation of the base units, developed through a study of local metric modularity (Previtero, 1998) and applied to the urban fabric layout (Figure 5). Typology variants were taken into consideration in order to differentiate the urban panorama and heighten the element of realism. Once the DTM

Figure 5

3D model for the distribution of buildings.

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was created, the irst architecture to be added was the church of San Pietro. It was chosen for its geometric characteristics and its historical relevance to the period in question (Safran, 1992).

At all the test phases, two dimensional digital survey and restoration (AutoCAD), 3D modelling (3ds Max) (Figure 6), exportation (dif for Torque Game Engine) and the creation and insertion of light and textures were required. The use of solids with non convex geometry was found to generate problems for the importation and management of those units by the graphics driver and, as such, the dedicated application Torque Constructor (Figures 7-9) was preferred. Complete navigation within the game environment and the creation of high-powered experiential learning contexts is further enhanced by graphic and voice interaction and by the integration of external environments (web browsing, tests, video, audio, diagrams, QuickTime VT, etc.) activated by user triggers, artiicial intelligence and preset actions.

Conclusions The MediaEvo project has led the researchers to consider some of the issues presented by the multidisciplinary nature of the project and the close correlation between technical and humanistic ields. In particular, conditions were created that put the narrative of historical research to the test in order to produce, in real time, objects, environments, situations and virtual landscapes, thought up in order to represent our stock of knowledge. Beyond the context of the present reconstruction, aspects of communication and education were examined drawing upon experiences reported in recent literature. Communication and representation are not limited to the pathway of a one-way guided narrative but open up possibilities for the enjoyable

Figure 6

Model of the church of S. Pietro.

Figure 7

Importation of the church in Torque.

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Figure 8

View of the church in Torque Constructor.

Figure 9

Insertion into the church in Torque.

elements of interaction and multisensory mediation, which merge object, subject and the experiential context.

As far as the communicative potential of a complete and practical virtual scenario is concerned, a series of properties for the game platform have been deined, such as to render the educative dimension effective. The inal product while responding to historical, technical, and pedagogic needs, presents as open-ended-interactive. In its instantaneous perfection, it aims to maximize experience, validating the historicalphilological elements and consenting constant checking and updating. The project evaluates the premises upon which the future development of a historical cyberspace is built; one which is able to produce possible alternative realities to our own — reconstructions capable of contextualising past experience.

References Antinucci, F. (1999). Computer per un iglio. Bari: Laterza Baudrillard, J. (1992). L’Illusion de la in ou la grève des événements. Parigi: Galilée. (Baudrillard, J., L’illusione della ine, o lo sciopero degli eventi. Milano: Anabasi, 1993) Bocchi, F. (2004). The city in four dimensions: the Nu.M.E. Project, Journal of Digital Information Management, II (4), 161-163.

Borgatti, C., Calori, L., Diamanti, T., Felicori, M., Guidazzoli, A., Liguori, M.C., Mauri, M.A., Pescarin, S., & Valentini, L. (2004). Databases and Virtual Environments: a Good Match for Communicating Complex Cultural Sites, ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Proceedings, Los Angeles.

Calvani, A. (2001). Educazione, comunicazione e nuovi media. Side pedagogiche e cyberspazio. Torino: UTET. Caniggia, G., & Maffei, G.L. (1979). Lettura dell’edilizia di base. Venezia: Marsilio.

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D’Andria, F., & Whitehouse, D. (1992). Excavations at Otranto. The Finds. Galatina (LE): Congedo.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Dawkins, R., Il gene egoista, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1979).

De Kerckhove, D. (1993). Brainframes. Mente, tecnologia, mercato. Come le tecnologie della comunicazione trasformano la mente umana. Bologna: Baskerville.

De Paolis, L.T., Celentano, M.G., Oliva, L., Vecchio, P., & Aloisio, G. (2009). Otranto in the Middle Ages: A Virtual Cultural Heritage Application. In K. Debattista, C. Perlingieri, D. Pitzalis, & S. Spina (Eds.). VAST-STAR, Short and Project Proceedings of VAST 2009, 10th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage.

University of Malta.

Fonseca, C.D., Roubis, D., & Sogliani, F. (Eds.) (2007). Jure Vetere. Ricerche archeologiche nella prima fondazione monastica di Gioacchino da Fiore (indagini 2001-2005). Cosenza: Rubettino.

Forte, M. (2003). Mindscape: Ecological thinking, cyber-anthropology, and virtual archaeological landscapes. In M. Forte, & P.R.Williams (Eds.). The reconstruction of Archaeological Landscapes through Digital Technologies. Proceedings of the 1st Italy-United States Workshop 2001 (pp. 95-108). Boston.

Ginzburg, C. (2006). Il ilo e le tracce. Vero, falso, into. Milano: Feltrinelli.

Gruber, T.R. (1993). A translation approach to portable ontologies, Knowledge Acquisition, 5 (2), 199-220.

Houben, H. (Ed.) (2007). Otranto nel Medioevo. Tra Bisanzio e l’Occidente. Galatina (LE): Congedo.

Houben, H. (Ed.) (2008). La conquista turca di Otranto (1480) tra storia e mito. Galatina (LE): Congedo.

Huizinga, J. (1939). Homo ludens. Amsterdam: Pantheon.

Kebritchi, M., & Hirumi, A. (2008). Examining the pedagogical foundations of modern educational computer games. Computers & Education, 51 (4), 1729-1743.

Liguori, M.C. (2008). Muvi. Museo virtuale della vita quotidiana nel secolo XX. Evoluzione di un progetto. Storia e Futuro, 18, 1-17.

Michaelides, D., & Wilkinson, D. (1992). Excavations at Otranto. The excavation. Galatina (LE): Congedo.

Morganti, F., & Riva, G. (2006). Conoscenza comunicazione e tecnologia. Aspetti cognitivi della realtà virtuale. Milano: LED Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto.

Paras, B.S., & Bizzocchi, J. (2005). Game, Motivation, and Effective Learning: An Integrated Model for Educational Game Design. DIGRA Conference. Proceedings of Digital Games Research Conference 2005. Vancouver: Worlds in Play.

Pescarin, S. (2009). Reconstructing Ancient Landscape. Budapest: Archaeolingua.

Postman, N. (1981). Ecologia dei media. La scuola come contropotere. Roma: Armando.

Previtero, S. (1998). Osservazioni sulla metrologia antica e medievale nel Salento. In S. D’Avino, & M. Salvatori (Eds.). Metrologia e tecniche costruttive. Contributi 5, 97.

Rosenstone, R.A. (1995). Revisioning History. Film and the Construction of a new Past.

Princeton: University Press.

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Safran, L. (1992). San Pietro at Otranto. Byzantine Art in South Italy. Roma: Rari Nantes – Viella.

Sartori, G. (2000). Homo videns. Bari: Laterza. Šklovskij, V.B. (1966). Una teoria della prosa: L’arte come artiicio. La costruzione del racconto e del romanzo. Bari: De Donato.

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Museums and new educational spaces Their key features and most significant characteristics for the creation of a model of atelier des enfants Paola Oliveri

ABSTRACT

Department Casa-Città – DICAS, College of Architecture, Polytechnic University of Turin, C.so Rosselli 105/10 B – 10129 Turin. E-mail: paola.oliveri@fastwebnet.it

This article focuses on research carried out on the ateliers des enfants in Europe. It presents an evaluation report, with their most important characteristics for the creation of a general model.

Keywords: research; museum education; creation of a model.

The ateliers des enfants: Museum spaces for kids The ateliers des enfants are areas inside a museum where children’s workshops and activities are provided under the supervision of an expert. The activities involve all forms of creativity: drawing, sculpture, theatre training, music, cinema and photography. Creativity is extremely important and a basic factor for a proicient study program. The ateliers are organized in 6 to 8 meetings, for different age groups and their duration is of around 2/3 hours. Generally, activities are not free of charge. The

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children can be left at the museum workshop for the duration of the activities and parents return to fetch them at the end of the meetings. The activities are created in collaboration with the museum, but they are independent from the museum itself. The workshop entrance can also be independent in many museums: children can use the spaces of the ateliers without visiting the museum collections and exhibitions areas.

There is a signiicant difference between the ateliers and the other educational and teaching activities offered by the museum, since the former implies the possibility to leave the children at the museum. Parents pay the children’s entrance (together with an insurance fee) each time or, alternatively, they can buy a set of coupons if available at an affordable price. Furthermore, parents delegate the responsibility of the children’s well-being to the museum for the whole duration of the workshop. The novelty of this new aspect is that you can leave the children at the workshop where they are supervised by an expert. More importantly, this costs less than hiring a baby sitter or leaving the child in a “baby parking” place.

Traditional and new teaching methods in Italy, in Great Britain, in Germany and in Spain: The differences in the ateliers des enfants Nowadays, teaching and museum education are calling for research on innovation, on the use of new technologies, new exhibits and forms of communication. In fact, the evolution in European new teaching methods and new trends have transformed museums into open spaces, where the relationship between museums and schools changes radically and involves a closer relationship between the museum and the individual. New museum spaces have been opened over the last ten years in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg and are known as the ateliers des enfants.

The ateliers des enfants are spaces specially designed for short period projects and workshops for children where they are offered a creative learning experience under the supervision of an expert.

Many differences exist between the atelier des enfants itself and the other educational activities organized by museums and more speciically: – children’s museums; – school workshops; – family spaces and activities: workshops, amateur theatricals and weekend visits; – children’s tours; – exhibitions speciically for children; – inventorium (to stimulate inventive talents);

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– – – – –

a night at the museum; a treasure hunt; art schools; a birthday party; children’s competitions.

Children’s museums A children’s museum is a museum that has been specially designed for children, who are given the possibility to experiment with nature and life itself. The exhibitions are designed ad hoc and for different age groups.

School workshops School workshops are educational experiences designed for student and teachers.

The latter are offered the possibility to further develop the school’s teaching programs but in a different location, with the workshop being held at the museum or in the open air. The programs are diversiied and involve, for example, experimenting with cave man life and the interaction with several scientiic experiments, thus making the whole experience richer and more entertaining, particularly for children. The cost of the activities is charged to the school or the pupil.

Opportunities for family groups: Workshops, amateur theatricals and weekend visits Museums offer special family workshops or tours with experts at the weekends: some activities are free of charge, others are not. Such activities are very common in all European museums. At the British Museum in London, during the temporary exhibition Hadrian: Empire and Conlict (2008), a space for a family workshop was created (with materials provided by the museum) whereby a team of experts created a plastic model of an old Roman city with the collaboration of children and their parents.

Children’s tours While the parents visit the museum’s collection and exhibitions, educational tours can be provided for groups of children. For example at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, a children’s tour is offered under the guide of an expert and at the end of the visit a workshop is also available. Audio-tours are commonly available too, with an interactive digital device. At the London Tate Modern, for example, there is a highly entertaining interactive tour around the collection.

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Exhibition for adults and for children Some museums use the same exhibition theme for both children and adults but separate the exhibiting areas. Naturally, the spaces for children are designed to provide an area in which children are freer to move around, with hands-on, edutainment, etc.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris often offers this kind of service.

The inventorium The Inventorium is an area for scientiic education matched with entertainment, where the younger generations can experiment with new technologies. An Inventorium exists in the Cité des Sciences – La Villette in Paris.

A night at the museum This was inspired by the ilm Night at the Museum, a comedy directed by Shawn Levy, starring Ben Stiller and Robin Williams. It is quite a fascinating experience being inside a museum during the night when everything is closed and ad hoc activities are carried out. At the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnica Leonardo da Vinci in Milan (Italy), this kind of experience is possible: children visit the museum with a torch and their sleeping bags and explore the collections whilst playing guessing games, telling stories and acting the part of important historical characters.

The treasure hunt The Treasure Hunt is an alternative way for children to visit the museum while learning through play. The Naval Museum of Madrid proposed an activity of this kind to schools.

Teachers can choose this type of visit and they help students, with their guidance and the directions provided by the museum, to resolve queries and answer a series of questions which are based on the major attractions of the museum. Even the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam provides material for participating in a treasure hunt, in this particular case, for children aged 6 to 10 years, through a very interesting and very enjoyable route. At the info desk of the museum the material for the hunt is distributed free of charge, and a small present is given to children when they solve the hunt.

Art schools Some museums offer art courses. The Museo del Prado, for example, organizes drawing courses where students copy exhibit paintings under the guidance of experts.

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A birthday party The museum, in this case, offers a workshop to celebrate birthday parties. For example, the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam, organizes birthday parties under the supervision of an expert. They begin with a short tour of the museum, and they inish at the lab with a workshop/painting party.

Children’s competitions Many museums organize competitions, the subject of which corresponds to the actual exhibitions. The children can participate either in the painting or short story writing sections. The eventual winner receives a price and his/her work is published on the museum’s web site.

Data research: Key features and most important aspects of the ateliers des enfants for the creation of a model The reasons for an evaluation-report The aim of this research is to create a model of atelier des enfants which can be implemented in any museum context. This evaluation report was drafted after many visits to the most important ateliers des enfants of Europe. The goal was to identify issues and key features of the spatial distribution, organizational, teaching and educational levels in order to create an innovative model. When preparing the report all the technical issues were taken into account: duration, number of meetings, cost, frequency, distribution of spaces and educational aspects, and, for example, the need, if any, of an expert. The evaluation aimed at analyzing the various aspects involved in an atelier des enfants. Needless to say each workshop presents different characteristics, depending on the subject of the museum exhibition, location, staff, funds available and the space reserved for this project. For this reason the compilation of this evaluation report was adapted to the effective reality of each museum which was visited. The evaluation report on the Louvre Museum is attached as an example.

The atelier as a center of culture and as a cultural bridge between the museum and the public Our goal is to create a model of atelier des enfants, a prototype of an innovative and experimental teaching center. Completely foreign to usual educational systems, the atelier must not be considered as a traditional museum space, which is part of the

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existing structure, but is aimed at the creation of cultural bridge between the museum and the public. The atelier thus becomes an instrument of cultural accessibility and creates a dynamic relationship between the user and the museum; it was founded as a center for teaching and extra activities using the most modern educational theories. In this perspective, the atelier is intended to encourage contact between experts and the public. Activities can be multiple and multidisciplinary with regards to the exhibits of the museum. The atelier is structured in sections as regards spatial distribution and represents the different ways and areas of approaching learning and creativity according to the various activities of the museum ranging from artistic and technological experiments on art, to writing.

The atelier as a lexible space to be included in the context of museum spaces.

The identiication of the key features and main aspects of the atelier through the assessment of the evaluation report and the creation of a model.

During visits of the on-site ateliers in museums some constant factors were identiied. They can be considered the starting point for the development of data to be included on a project level. Spatial and structural distribution besides the educational aspects were identiied as essential features in the reports. The area dedicated to the atelier is of key importance and is dimensioned according to the proposed activities, it must be lexible and modular to adapt to different needs. The ateliers should be considered a space for research, an incubator for the development of the individual, a new source of interaction between experimentation and the public.

The essential characteristics identiied in the project for the creation of a model of the ateliers des enfants are: – the space: deinition and characteristics; – different types of activities; – availability of a research center; – communication.

A model of atelier des enfants, the results of the research: The project The research has highlighted some key issues and essential characteristics for the deinition of a project.

The spaces (reception, the waiting room, cash desk, rest rooms). This area is dedicated to the exchange of information, registration and waiting areas for parents.

Sometimes, the reception is also used for the museum atelier, such as in the Cité de la Musique in Paris. In the Louvre Museum there is an area completely dedicated to 204

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the ateliers, with the reception, cash desk and rooms for activities, the waiting room and rest rooms. The cash desk is usually shared with the museum. Rest rooms must be available for children and parents in this area.

The ateliers. Depending on the space available, they should allow for the entry of a dozen children and the teacher. The space designed for the activities can be outlined in three categories: painting, sculpture and other art forms; theatre training, photography and cinema; music.

By equipping these three areas, it means that museum must have considerable lexibility and a variety of proposals in order to be competitive. The Louvre Museum, for example, offers ive rooms for painting and sculpture activities. The Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne offers a vast atelier dedicated to children, with spaces designed for all the above-mentioned activities. This atelier is located in a large open space, where the area dedicated to painting activities is separated from the others by large windows, through which the parents can watch their children working. A well equipped area is dedicated to the theatre and cinema training courses, complete with costumes and cameras.

Exhibiting gallery. It is very exciting for the public to have the opportunity to exhibit their works produced during internships and workshops in a museum, even if only in a dedicated area. An exhibition space devoted to workshops exists in many museums, in others this kind of exhibition is organized in certain periods of the year.

Some museums publish works produced by the children on their website.

Activities (type of activity, cost, duration and number of meetings, age groups).

In order to improve its turnover, all museums have to propose activities related to their exhibitions, often changing the themes with a creative and stimulating offer. To optimize staff costs and opening hours, museums offer courses for children and their parents, as in Paris. The costs must be competitive to attract users (for example in Italy the price ranges between 4 and 6 euros per hour). The duration of the activities is of around one and a half up to two hours. The number of meetings may vary depending on the project. Age groups are selected by experts, as well as the activities offered.

Typically, age groups for children are three: 3-5 years, 6-9 years, 10-13 years.

Ateliers for adults and the disabled. During the course of the research it was surprising to ind out that the evolution of the ateliers des enfants has further developed, through good organization and rotation of staff and the optimization of resources and spaces, into the creation of activities for adults and the disabled. The organization of ateliers for adults and for the disabled transforms the museum into a creative space for everyone.

Center for research. A center for educational research is essential when setting up an atelier des enfants. In Paris, some museums have one in the building, as in the 205

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Louvre Museum, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay. Others rely on the public institutions, like all museums under the jurisdiction of the Marie de Paris (City Hall), such as the Carnavalet Museum, the Museum Cognacq-Jay, etc. The research center should be prepared to: – work and research in a team, even with external and specialist teams; – organize conferences and exchange activities with other groups and museums; – participate in national and international research projects, courses and workshops with experts; – carry out research, publications, documentaries and video conferences for researchers, professionals and non professionals, for schools and children.

Communication. Communication and information should be organized as follows: – published on the website and continually updated; – available at the info point area in the museum; – published in brochures and in other printed advertising; – advertised in media; – readily available for museum collaboration with other entities for information and enrollment. For example, the Louvre Museum is working with Fnac, which distributes free of charge the bi-annual magazine published by the museum, to which you can subscribe.

The ateliers visited Switzerland – Berne: 1. Zentrum Paul Klee. France – Paris: 2. Centre Pompidou, 3. Cinémathèque française, 4. Institut du Monde Arabe, 5. Musée des Arts décoratifs, 6. Musée des Arts et Métiers, 7. Musée Bourdelle, 8. Musée Carnavalet, 9. Musée Cernuschi, 10. Musée Cognacq-Jay, 11. Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, 12. Maison des Contes et des Histoires, 13. Musée d’Orsay, 14. Musée du Louvre, 15. Musée du quai Branly, 16. Musée Jacquemart-André, 17. Musée du Petit Palais, 18. Musée de la Poste, 19. Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 20. Musée National de la Marine Musée en Herbe, 21. Musée de la Musique, 22. Musée National du Moyen Age.

The museums visited Italy. Turin – 1. Abbazia di Novalesa (Susa), 2. Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, 3. Castello di Venaria Reale, 4. Fondazione Merz, 5. Fondazione

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Palazzo Bricherasio, 6. Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l’Arte, 7. GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, 8. Museo di Antichità, 9. Museo Civico d’Arte Antica e Palazzo Madama, 10. Museo Egizio, 11. Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 12. Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali, 13. Orto Botanico, 14.

Palazzina di Caccia di Stupinigi, 15. Palazzo Falletti di Barolo, 16. Palazzo Reale.

Florence – 17. Complesso di San Lorenzo, 18. Complesso di Santa Maria del Fiore, 19. Complesso di Santa Croce, Galleria degli Ufizi, 20. Galleria dell’Accademia, 21. Museo degli strumenti musicali, 22. Museo dei marmi, 23. Museo dei ragazzi, 24. Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce, 25. Museo di Santa Maria Novella, 26. Museo dell’Opiicio delle Pietre dure, 27. Museo Nazionale Alinari della Fotograia, 28.

Museum activities – Leonardo da Vinci, 29. Palazzo Bastogi-Archivio Storico del Comune di Firenze, 30. Palazzo Medici Riccardi, 31. Palazzo Strozzi, 32. Palazzo Vecchio. Genova – 33. Acquario, 34. Città dei bambini. Milan – 35. Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica Leonardo da Vinci, 36. MUBA. Rome – 37. EUREKA. Venice – 38. Biennale di Architettura, 39. Fondazione Peggy Guggheneim.

Germany. Weill am Rhein – 40. Vitra Design Museum.

UK. London – 41. British Museum, National Gallery, 42. National Portrait Gallery, 43. Natural History Museum, 44. Serpentine Gallery, 45. Tate Modern, 46. Victoria & Albert Museum, 47. Kew Royal Botanic Garden.

Switzerland. Bellinzona – 48. Castelgrande. Luzern – 49. Kunstmuseum. Riehen – 50. Fondazione Beyeler. Berne – 51. Zentrum Paul Klee.

Spain. Madrid – 52. Museo del Prado, 53. Museo de America, 54. Museo Naval, 55. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Barcelona – 56. CosmoCaixa.

The Netherlands. Amsterdam — 57. Van Gogh Museum.

References Antinucci, F. (2004). Comunicare nel museo. Roma: Laterza.

Benjamin, W. (1936). Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. (Benjamin, W., L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica, Torino: Einaudi, 1966).

Bodo, S. (2000). Il museo relazionale. Rilessioni ed esperienze europee. Torino: Fondazione Agnelli.

Cataldo, L., & Paraventi, M. (2007). Il Museo oggi. Linee guida per una museologia contemporanea. Milano: Hoepli.

Caves, R.E. (2001). L’industria della creatività. Economia delle attività artistiche e culturali.

Milano: ETAS. Cisotto Nalon, M. (2000). II museo come laboratorio per la scuola. Padova: Il Poligrafo.

Nardi, E. (1999). Un laboratorio per la didattica museale. Roma: Edizioni SEAM.

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Prete, C. (2005). Aperto al pubblico. Comunicazione e servizi educativi nei musei. Firenze: Ediir.

Ricciardi, M. (2008). Il Museo dei miracoli. Milano: Apogeo.

Santagata, W. (2000). La fabbrica della cultura. Ritrovare la creatività per aiutare lo sviluppo del paese. Bologna: Il Mulino.

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ADDENDUM Ateliers des enfants sample evaluation report Musée du Louvre – Paris Information and communication

Website: all the information on the ateliers can be found on the museum website.

Information available in the museum: the info desk is the main area for the workshops and provides all the information you may need.

Brochures: catalogues (one is created especially for teachers) with workshop information are available both at the museum and at Fnac.

Enrollment: you can enroll at the museum and at Fnac.

Activities

Painting: painting on an easel, studies on light and colours.

Sculpture: how to manipulate and create with materials.

Fun and educational guiding: theme trails (feathers and dots), historical walks, games to learn about the works of great artists.

Cost: € 4.50 per meeting.

Duration: one and a half hours for younger children, two hours for older children.

Number of meetings: 4 to 8 for each course.

More than one activity at a time : yes (5 rooms available).

Age groups: 4-6, 6-8, 7-10, 8-10, 10-12.

Other: workshops for adults. Free of charge workshops for disabled people with reduced mobility, visual and hearing impaired and their assistants.

Other activities for children in addition to individual activities: activities with schools, courses with audio guides, activities for families.

Spaces

Entrance: which is reached from the reception area.

Reception: giving access to workshop areas.

Workshop areas: 5 rooms.

Exhibition gallery: no.

Study center

Teaching research center: yes.

Teamwork: yes.

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Spaces for activities

Rest rooms: yes.

Painting and sculpture: the activities refer directly to these two subjects and to the collection exhibited in the museum.

Theater training: no.

Photography and ilm courses: no.

Music: no.

Exhibition Gallery: no.

Services

Waiting rooms for parents: yes.

Workshops and other activities for parents: yes.

Interaction through the website: you can download the brochure, but there are no interactive activities for children (games, etc.).

Considerations

Overall rating (organization, teamwork, expert’s skills): there is a team that deals exclusively with the organization of activities and themes to be proposed. Activities are planned in collaboration with the museum and with experts in the ield.

Interest: the courses are always fully booked. Parents and children are very happy with this service.

Pros/risk considerations: from a personal perspective I think that the offer of activities at the Louvre museum is excellent. The negative aspects relate to the enormous low of tourists and the dificulty of reaching such a central location.

The less important museums offer tours that are more facilitated, but then again, the collection being exhibited is different. I found the choice of some families to visit various museums in the city and to participate in the workshops being held therein very interesting.

Facilities for parents (reduced tickets, tour museums, activities): yes, there are facilities, activities, alternative ateliers according to the days of the month and the opening times.

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Learning, teamwork and technologies in the classroom How to use information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve work group at school Davide Parmigiani

ABSTRACT

Department of Humanities Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Genoa, Corso Podestà, 2 – 16128 Genova. E-mail: davide.parmigiani@unige.it

Teachers work with technology in the classroom or in the computer lab mostly with students arranged in pairs or in small groups. This article presents a study which has tried to ind the most suitable ways to design and to organize group work in the classroom with information and communication technologies (ICTs), comparing it with collaborative learning that occurs online. The research will demonstrate that group work at school can take place in three areas: the classroom, the classroom or computer lab around the computers, and online. The results show keywords and guidelines to design instructional activities for groups and to support collaboration with the help of technologies.

Keywords: group work; interaction; learning; cooperation.

Theoretical framework The situations most often seen in schools as far as practice teaching using information and communication technologies (ICTs) is concerned are within a face-to-face environment, in the classroom or in the computer lab. It is very probable that teachers start to implement activities with ICTs in situations that they are most familiar with and that are the least complicated for them to manage, such as, the making of a video, a hypertext, or multimedia lessons. Internet is normally used to locate and download

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useful information, to expand upon, or as a supplement to, topics which begin in the classroom. Collaborative learning online is still limited.

In fact, in recent years, the collaboration and the development of collaborative learning have been pursued mainly online via e-learning. These processes have been implemented and are improving in centres of higher education (universities or research centres) or in business areas. Learning with internet struggles to penetrate in Italian schools, especially in schools with pupils aged from six to fourteen, for a number of reasons such as, lack of equipment, inlexible school timetables, and inadequate teacher skills.

When teachers want to experiment with educational activities in ICTs to improve teamwork at school, they often arrange the classroom like a workshop: students interact around a computer creating a group with cognitive, social and emotional goals.

Research conducted in recent years, has tried to focus on how to organize collaborative lessons in the classroom with ICTs to emphasize the characteristics and values of collaborative learning in the classroom and computer lab, on the one hand, and, on the other, to suggest learning strategies for teachers intending to use ICTs during daily school activities.

Research conducted in recent years (Allaire et al., 2008; Garrison et al., 2001; Ligorio et al., 2006; Ligorio et al., 2009; Overdijk & Van Diggelen, 2009) shows ICTs as potential vectors for an elaborate learning promoting life skills indicated as necessary for the construction of useful knowledge in order to continue to learn in the course of social and professional life: decision making, problem solving, creativity, critical thinking, effective communication, interaction skills, coping and self-management skills (Franchini, 2007). The work group should become the style and the instrument to pursue these goals effectively.

The activities carried out at school can essentially be divided into three types: – individual work where learning is aimed primarily at the individual mind: the relationship between knowledge, competencies or skills and the one who learns, is basically direct; – group work where learning is organized for groups: the goals are varied but the main objective remains the learning of the individual, so the group and its activities are functional to the individual; – group work where learning is essentially different from the previous types: by working within a group, the individual can elaborate meanings which would not otherwise be possible if he were working on his own because there are certain elaborations that can only be constructed in a social context (Parmigiani, 2009).

From a theoretical point of view, team learning — the third point — is qualitatively different from the one prior to that, even if they are closely related and constant. The three perspectives, hence, are not alternatives to one another as they concern both the 212

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individual and the group at the same time. In the irst point, the educational activities aim at the evolution of the individual who measures his/her own knowledge, skills and individual competencies. In the second point, the organization is of the cooperative type, but it still tends towards individuality. Individual contributions and interaction among the members tend, in fact, to strengthen the individual’s knowledge. In the third type, the organization is collaborative and processing is inter-subjective. Team learning is founded on the belief that the work group requires participants to become co-learners who are not there to simply help each other out (Zajac & Hartup 1997; Blatchford et al., 2003).

Members’ input, therefore, does not concern only prior knowledge, but also, and above all, individual interpretations on open issues that intersect with the interpretations of the others. As such, the group is a discussion team that distinguishes, motivates and argues to design ways to develop, to construct new meanings, and to provide critical interpretations (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2003).

Activities using ICTs tend to enhance this perspective because, on the one hand, the individual is encouraged to be the protagonist of his own learning through tools and digital products; on the other hand, the group is involved in the critical analysis, the development and sharing of objects and the construction of artefacts. Teacher planning begins at the individual stage, continues on in the cooperative/collaborative stage, hence returning to the single student in a networked perspective.

Interaction among the students in a collaborative relationship with ICTs, comes from the transmission of information and close coordination amongst themselves to reach deined roles, share resources and common goals (Himmelmann, 1993; Misanchuk & Anderson, 2001). Strijbos & Martens (2001) and Strijbos et al. (2004) have developed a model of group-based learning in which the activities of the group constantly change, from very closely guided cooperation with roles deined by the teacher, closed skills and well-structured tasks (represented by the authors by the jigsaw technique) to a very open collaboration where there is a low level of prestructuring of the group, and where the tasks are ill-structured and provide many solutions with terminal open skills (represented by the authors by the progressive inquiry technique).

At school these two educational opportunities represent theoretical reference points. It is probable that a teacher can visualize various kinds of activities that would change depending on how they are held on three axes: high or low level prestructuring of the group; well or ill-structured tasks; open or closed skills. In a class, for example, that has not yet had signiicant experience in cooperation, it is appropriate to consider a high level of pre-structuring of the group to avoid disrupting the team, as well as a clearly deined task to allow the teacher to monitor and handle the activities effectively. At the same time, a class with a lot of previous experience in 213

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cooperation, should be given less organized tasks, based on inquiry with minimal pre-structuring of the group because the students are already trained in assigning roles and tasks in an evenly balanced manner.

This approach to education is based on the principle of the design of a networked classroom. In our case we do not want to associate it to expressions such as, online, computer-based or web-based. Our deinition of a networked classroom is a learning environment that, on the one hand includes the use of internet and ICTs best suited to deal with educational activities; while on the other hand, avoids the exclusive development of procedures through the internet or through ICTs. The networked classroom, thus, provides for the interaction of online and ofline methods (Garrison & Vaughan, 2007) with different types of technologies (books, voice, computer, internet). The online work enhances the face-to-face work and vice versa. As such, the digital classroom is a networked classroom because it develops a variety of interaction among the different actors of the learning environment to produce information and build knowledge.

III-structured task (no clear-cut solution)

Open Skills (e.g. negotiation)

Progressive Inquiry

Hight level of pre-structuring

Low level of pre-structuring

Jigsaw Well-structured task (limited solution)

Figure 1

Closed skills (e.g. basic concepts)

Group-based learning. (Strjibos & Martens, 2001)

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In the context of Media Education, the theme of the relationship between information and knowledge represents a key issue. Information and knowledge, in fact, are closely related even if the irst is necessary but not suficient. Interaction is not enough (Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005) because it’s not suficient that there is interaction in order to create learning, nor is it possible to build knowledge and competence with only the presence of information. In the progressive informational, social and emotional complexity of contemporary media schools have to face a new teaching organization. Through group work, students recognize information and, therefore, attach meaning to the information. Students go along a path where the graphic or textual information is linked with the verbal, nonverbal or paraverbal languages and where the information is understood through the different types of equipment (books, newspapers, movies, tv, internet). It is the essence of a daily media education at school (Rivoltella, 2005).

Research design To design educational practices achievable in the three learning environments named, a study was launched in which existing research projects and activities in Italian schools based on assumptions presented above were included. We looked for experiences in progress in basic education (pupils aged from six to fourteen) that connect and explain, at least in the form of an attempt, the main points expressed in the preceding paragraphs. Initially, some interviews were carried out to outline the design features and to test the binding of the project with the research. In some cases structured projects involving the school, more schools and schools’ networks have been analyzed. In other cases, we found less structured and less extensive projects but not less signiicant. One of the primary purposes of the investigation, in fact, was to highlight the actions carried out by teachers, even if it was local action concerning a single school or even a single class. The discriminating factor that led us in the choice was the connexion between teaching strategies, group work and ICTs in the classroom, in the computer lab and online and, thus, the possibility of identifying good practices, highlighting the keywords and guidelines and designing a model. In particular, networks of schools have been identiied that have some common basic characteristics and a common education where group work is a driving force. Group work in the classroom, in the computer lab and online proceeds simultaneously (Kleine Staarman et al., 2005) through a platform which permits the creation of online groups among students from the same school or remote schools. So, the students can experience many types of interaction and they can build knowledge through discussions, exchange of ideas, individual and group thinking in face-to-face and online environments.

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Focus groups of teachers involved in research and other teachers involved in the integration of ICTs at school were held. The technique of focus groups was chosen as research needed to collect discussed and shared data among teachers engaged in the ield of educational technology. The primary objective of these meetings was to bring to the surface the consistent features in planning that guide teachers in organizing activities. So, the experiential relection, allowed for the visualisation and sharing of words that guide the educational activities and, consequently, enabled them to be transformed into planning tools and communicable to other teachers.

The teaching/learning structure Keywords Through different kinds of analysis and meetings with teachers, some basic keywords have emerged which are useful to guide the design of group activities in the classroom with computers and other technologies. They are divided into areas corresponding to dimensions of teaching. The project area covers mainly the words that guide the design and preparation of group activities with ICTs; the knowledge area indicates the words that link the group and technologies with learning; the interaction area displays interactive carriers that bind the actors included in the educational setting; the methodological area underlines approaches to be used so that ICTs facilitate effective learning in groups and, inally, the organizational area considers the physical and logistical variables that can promote or affect the activities (Table 1).

The guidelines Besides the keywords which surfaced, we underline some guidelines which lead teachers to the construction of the learning environment. We divided them into areas that relate to the overall objective, group management, the network concept in the classroom and between classes and strategies to enable effective collaborative learning activities with ICTs (Table 2).

Building a model We tried to build a model without aiming to create a static and rigid technique but we indicated some variables on which to base a method that teachers can use and modify in many contexts and situations. We found mainly four sectors: relationship between classroom and computer lab; learning environment organization; interaction among students, groups, tasks and educational goals; training in group work.

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Open design

The open design means that the objectives, groups and educational activities can be varied by pupils or by development of the work over time.

Many ways

The design has many paths for development allowing it to perform different tasks in the same class.

Teaching strategies suggested by ICTs and planning

The teacher tries to accommodate and operate the workshop methodologies that technologies suggest.

Flexibility of design

The collaborative design is flexible and adaptable.

Display of knowledge

With ICTs, the group can more easily see the knowledge, focus on it and debate effectively about it.

By editing knowledge

With ICTs knowledge tends to be seen in motion, developing the ability to use knowledge, to reconstruct the provenance, dismantle and restructure it, to build new knowledge.

Reusable works

Objects built from the class (or classes) can be reused in other learning environments.

Hypertextuality/reticularity

The hypertext of the nineties is evolving into a network that includes knowledge and actors of different types.

Disciplinary knowledge/ transversal competencies

A collaborative design with ICTs deals with knowledge in its dual meaning.

Interaction

A collaborative design with ICTs facilitates participants to narrate their own learning, metacognitive, emotional and social experiences.

Feed-back

Interaction of the group with ICTs and among group members allows participants to regulate their own work.

Tutoring

The interaction with ICTs and other students activates the processes of aid among group members during the work group.

Customizing

The work with ICTs may differ depending on the specificities of the students to exploit their skills.

Involvement

Group work with ICTs proposes many opportunities for participation and leadership in training processes by all the actors.

Testing

Group work with ICTs encourages experimentation of new educational tracks partly unexplored but deemed to be meaningful learning.

Project Area

Knowledge Area

Interaction Area

Methodological area

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Organizational Area

Table 1

Inquiry and discovery

With ICTs, teachers design activities where students investigate the knowledge rather than learn it in an uncritical way.

Collaboration

ICTs suggest procedures for collaborative work in which knowledge is the result of interaction between knowledge, actors, information, tools.

Management of timetable school and computer labs

School timetables and utilization of computer labs are two key variables in the management of activities with ICTs.

Group organization

Group work with ICTs in the classroom must be organized so that the skills of each member help to build the knowledge of the class.

Keywords.

The irst point shows that teachers must plan their activities in the classroom and in the computer lab at the same time. Experienced teachers organize learning activities linked to the classroom, the computer lab, the home, and other schools.

Different environments become workshops where students can work individually or in groups, with digital or old technologies. Consequently the second point indicates a lexible learning environment to create different types of interaction among students.

The third point suggests creating a networked classroom to allow students to experience multiple interactions with technologies and learning environments: in the classroom, between classes and between schools. Gradually, we can build a network of cognitive, emotional and social relationships. So the class becomes a learning community because the pupils can have irsthand knowledge of how to build through interaction with other students.

Consequently, the fourth point indicates that it is important to train the students in teamwork through group work experiences with different technologies in many contexts: in the classroom without technologies, in the classroom/computer lab with technologies and online. If the students experiment with different types of teamwork in various environments, positive interdependence tends to spread to all scholastic situations, so it is more likely that the class becomes a group where individual and team needs interact to achieve individual and team learning.

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Overall purpose

Group Management

Network

Strategies and architectures

To enable interaction of multiple intelligences

Aims of group work with ICTs should bring out different skills and bring out the different types of intelligences (practical, critical, manipulative, synthetic, etc.).

Instructional design as group work for the teachers

The design of activities with ICTs may involve a single teacher but preferably should involve the teachers who work in that school, so teaching style tends to permeate all activities.

Create a digital environment

A digital environment is easily manipulated by the students and teachers.

Shared decision-making about technologies

The choice of equipment and their use is proposed by teachers and shared by students so that the construction of digital cognitive artifacts is as participatory as possible.

Circular thinking

An idea of mobile cognition emerges from the group work with ICTs: reaching the individual, being processed in the group and returning to individual students and teachers.

Workshop approach

The workshop idea is the basis of group work as a community of learning that is configured in multiple ways.

Interchangeability of roles and tasks

Tasks within the group and between groups can be accomplished by most people who assume several roles.

Changes in status/role transitions

Status and roles of the participants are modified in the course of group work.

Interdependence in the different environments

a working group with ICTs that takes place in a computer lab, classroom or online tends to reinforce the perception of positive interdependence.

Dynamic space for sharing/co-participation

The network is seen as a dynamic space that meets most school environments and life contexts (class, classes, computer labs, home, family, etc.).

Family involvement

The network is expanding and wants to develop familiarity with distance communication involving actors beyond the school.

Information retrieval

The network becomes synonymous with inquiry and management of critical information.

Projects in network

Projects linking more students, more classes or schools are the expression of collaboration while the teacher assumes the roles and prerogatives of the holder and operator of the network of learning, communication and collaboration.

Problem solving

Ability to identify, address and resolve challenging situations would seem the most appropriate strategy for the emergence of collaborative behaviors.

Action research Discovery of group/ guided discovery Learning from experience

Table 2

The guidelines.

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References Allaire, S., Laferrière, T., Hamel, C., Breuleux, A., Turcotte, S., Beaudoin, J., & Inchauspé, P. (2008). L’École éloignée en réseau (Scuole lontane in rete): sostenere lo sviluppo professionale degli insegnanti nelle pratiche di collaborazione a distanza in un contesto di scuole rurali in Québec. Formare, 54.

Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (2003). Learning to Work Creatively With Knowledge. In E. De Corte, L. Verschaffel, N. Entwistle & J. van Merriënboer (Eds.), Powerful learning environments: Unraveling basic components and dimensions (pp. 55-68). Oxford: Elsevier Science.

Blatchford, P., Kutnick, P., Baines, E., & Galton, M. (2003). Toward a social pedagogy of classroom group work. International Journal of Educational Research, 39 (1-2), 153172.

Franchini, R. (2007). Competenza. In R. Cerri (Ed.), L’evento didattico. Dinamiche e processi (pp. 45-58). Roma: Carocci.

Garrison, D.R., & Cleveland-Innes, M. (2005). Facilitating Cognitive Presence in Online Learning: Interaction Is Not Enough. American Journal of Distance Education, 19 (3), 133-148.

Garrison, D.R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2001). Critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing in distance education. American Journal of Distance Education, 15 (1), 17-23.

Garrison, D.R., & Vaughan, N. (2007). Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Himmelmann, A.T. (1993). Helping each other help others: Principles and practices of collaboration. ARCH Factsheet, 25, 2-5.

Kleine Staarman, J., Krol, K., & Van der Meijden, H. (2005). Peer interaction in three collaborative learning environments. Journal of Classroom Interaction, 40 (1), 29-39.

Ligorio, M.B., Cacciamani, S., & Cesareni, D. (2006). Blended learning. Dalla scuola dell’obbligo alla formazione adulta. Roma: Carocci.

Ligorio, M.B., Andriessen, J., Baker, M., Knoller, N., & Tateo L. (2009). Talking over the computer. Pedagogical scenarios to blend computer and face to face interaction. Napoli: Scriptaweb.

Misanchuk, M., & Anderson, T. (2001). Building community in an online learning environment: communication, cooperation and collaboration. Proceedings of the annual Midsouth instructional technology conference (6th, Murfreesboro, april 8-10).

Overdijk, M., & Van Diggelen, W. (2009). Computer support for problem solving discussion in the classroom. In M.B. Ligorio, J. Andriessen, M. Baker, N. Knoller, & L. Tateo (Eds.).

Talking over the computer. Pedagogical scenarios to blend computer and face to face interaction (pp. 65-82). Napoli: Scriptaweb.

Parmigiani, D. (2009). Tecnologie di gruppo. Trento: Erickson.

Rivoltella, P.C. (2005). Media education: Fondamenti didattici e prospettive di ricerca. Brescia: La Scuola.

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Strijbos, J.W., & Martens, R.L. (2001). Group-based learning: Dynamic interaction in groups.

In P. Dillenbourg, A. Eurelings & K. Hakkarainen (Eds.), European perspectives on computer-supported collaborative learning: proceedings of the 1st European conference on computer-supported collaborative learning (pp. 569-576). Maastricht: Maastricht University.

Strijbos, J.W., Martens, R.L., & Jochems, W.M.G. (2004). Designing for interaction: Six steps to designing computer-supported group-based learning. Computers & Education, 42 (4), 403-424.

Zajac, R.J., & Hartup, W.W. (1997). Friends as coworkers: Research review and classroom implications. The Elementary School Journal, 98 (1), 3-13.

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Social Network Analysis for Moodle: How to evaluate the informal learning and its dynamics in virtual contexts Nicolò Antonio Piave

ABSTRACT

University of Macerata, Piaggia della Torre 8 – 62100 Macerata. E-mail: npiave@gmail.com

The Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a valuable tool for assessing informal processes and knowledge building/sharing that take place for the evaluation of formal learning among students. While traditional tools are widely used in virtual settings, informal learning has some special features that prevent or hinder assessment by teachers. This article1 concerns the development of software for Moodle™, called “Sociomatrix Finder” (ver. 1.5), which can construct, in function of the posts present in the forums of the e-learning platform and, applying some preliminary conventions, a sociometric matrix ready for tracing the graph of social network. Thus, each teacher is able, every day, to analyze the structure and evolution of the social network of their alumni in order to understand what actions should be taken to improve their learning. The software is also able to offer further guidance, based on a weighted evaluation model: the evaluation, in fact, represents the determination of a complex index of participation, which results from the balance between formal parameters (individual reiication) and informal parameters (social role within the informal network of each student-actor) that the teacher can determine using a rough index of participation, directly calculated by the software, and from indicators of 1

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This article is a reviewed and updated version of a paper presented at “Modernity 2.0”, 9th Conference of Sociocybernetics held in Urbino (Italy) on 29 June-5 July 2009 (see http://larica.uniurb.it/rc51/, verified on 04/08/2009), by the author.

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centrality and prestige, calculated on the sociometric matrix.

All this is summarized in a formula that takes into account both aspects of participation and reiication of the complex learning process.

Keywords: Social Network Analysis; informal learning; community of practice.

The knowledge flow in the web 2.0 vision The development and growth of network technologies in recent years has transformed the way people communicate, share, exchange, work and live. The variety of tools that allows the universal availability of resources and the ability to edit and share information often affects the real concept of knowledge as a separated and structured complex of processed data. According to Siemens (2004), «The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe», because only through the network, it is possible to access the knowledge: so the connections, nodes, links and exchange of data represent a speciic connotation of a low which passes through the structure and is continuously changed, improved, shared, and enriched by the contributions of several people involved. This low is knowledge. Knowledge is no longer a static and structured concept, but is now regarded as a dynamic product of social contact through use of technology (Piave et al., 2008).

The revolution of the web, caused by the ease with which each user can simultaneously be both author and fruiter of online resources (Tapscott & Williams, 2006), implies a new kind of relationship between people and content: from a passive mode of participation, individuals become protagonists in the low of knowledge and, like nodes, through the building of links within the global social network, can play an important role of collective or selish interest. The web 2.0 technologies put into the hands of the common user the power to create, edit and share all types of resources throughout the world (O’Reilly, 2005) with great ease and low cost.

The lexibility of the user, who is contemporarily both producer and consumer of content (in one word summary, “prosumer”) is the answer to the need for lifelong learning in the knowledge society (Alberici, 2002): the socio-economic reality is continuously growing and requires the availability of skills and abilities which are increasingly complex and interconnected. Our society needs “knowledge workers” who are fully integrated and responsive to the global social network. For this reason, the vision of lifelong learning implies a gradual recognition of skills and knowledge that are the subject of acquisition by individuals outside the traditional institutional

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places such as schools and universities (Cross, 2007; Bonaiuti, 2006; Colardyn & Bjornavold’s, 2004): informal learning represents a kind of competitive advantage for organizations that are able to import and include informal knowledge within their traditional processes. Informal learning is dynamic, has a social character, is based on exchange and not all of it can be translated into formal knowledge, i.e., not all informal knowledge can be encoded, because part of it remains within the personality of the individual, within his experience and his way of being (Nonaka & Tacheuchi, 1995). In this way human resources are a crucial factor of success for businesses today.

The development of technologies that improve the “prosumption” on one hand and the need to recognize informal learning within the contemporary socio-economic model on the other hand, determines the strategic importance of tools for teachers (and managers), able to assess the quality of informal learning within an organization, in addition to the formal interventions of traditional training. Through special instruments that take account of the organization of social networks, you can measure the role that each employee (student), has in the production of services (in education) and what he / she accounts for the overall results of the organization (the value of his learning).

Informal learning between Personal Learning Environment and e-portfolio In order to better understand the value of informal learning, we can refer to the Wenger’s (1995) theory of communities of practice (CoP), which deines CoP as social realities in which processes of participation and reiication are combined and considered phenomena neither antithetical nor static, but as a dynamic duality always present, in varying degrees, within a community. Participation involves different ways of approach to the social network of an organization and is linked to the role that each individual has in that social network: it is not only a quantitative parameter, but (with some limits) is also a qualitative parameter. In other words, in a CoP, you can have one or more individuals who send lots of messages, which are responsible for a large low of exchanges within the organization: but how many of these exchanges, how many of these messages will be really important and strategic for the objectives of the organization? The role that an individual has in the informal social network can explain its importance for the vitality of the organization, its competence in various ields and the degree of conidence that the other employees/students have placed in him. Therefore, simple quantitative parameters regarding online participation are not

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suficient to evaluate the performance of individuals, but you need other tools that highlight the roles and the general structure of the social network. The usage of Social Network Analysis is, therefore, extremely important (Knoke & Yang, 2008).

Given that informal learning takes place outside of traditional educational institutions, although we cannot exclude the possibility that this happens even in such places, inding the ideal places in which informal dynamics can proliferate is crucial: tacit knowledge and informal social practices take place only in social environments that are free, spontaneous and lacking of supervision or other forms of control. The Wikipedia deinition of informal learning, in fact, is as follows: – it does not take place in special educational establishments standing out from normal life and professional practice; – it has no curriculum and is not professionally organized but rather originates accidentally, sporadically, in association with certain occasions, from changing practical requirements; – it is not planned pedagogically conscious, systematically according to subjects, test and qualiication-oriented, but rather unconsciously incidental, holistically problem-related, and related to situation management and itness for life; – it is experienced directly in its “natural” function as a tool for living and survival». (Wikipedia, informal learning)

Therefore, teachers should encourage students — in conditions of freedom and autonomy — in their learning activities within virtual environments that must be poor in control and rich in exchanges and communication tools for socializing, such as e-portfolio (Rossi & Giannandrea, 2006) and PLE (Attwell, 2007; Schaffert & Hilzensauer, 2008). In many ways these types of virtual instruments represent an interesting attempt to engage people in an informal way, in order to promote the emergence and development of communities of practice in different sectors. Even if the environment has an important role, it is only the social glue that can determine the success of this operation: if people begin to exchange, to contact each other, after a short period the community will produce interesting effects and a sense of freedom, with an intense exchange of information that will accompany the reticle structure of social organization, with relevant beneits.

About the training settings, virtual environments such as e-portfolio (or PLE) can offer a free place for communication to students, but also imply a structural dificulty on the free and spontaneous nature of the environment itself: how to evaluate, in fact, informal learning processes, without any further monitoring and tracking users’ activities? It is obvious that if people are aware of being observed, it is rare that they put free and spontaneous conduct in practice, with a negative impact on the quality and the existence of informal learning. Also, forcing people to produce something tangible such as documents, resources, artifacts, means not only to eliminate the 226

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perception of a free and spontaneous environment, but also to abandon the informal approach to knowledge; in other words, the knowledge produced through varying assigned tasks cannot represent informal knowledge. So the possibility of intervention for teachers (or for people outside the community of students) must be minimized (Piave, 2008).

For educational purposes you must make a compromise between the freedom accorded to the learners and the need to evaluate their activities through tracking: e-portfolio is therefore this compromise (the PLE is less likely to represent a compromise, because it is built on the concept of absolute freedom of the student and consists of a potentially ininite set of interconnected web applications, for which to trace the activities of learning is basically impossible). So the e-portfolio, with its structure, allows students to exit the virtual and reach other web 2.0 applications, but through the implementation of an internal forum and the availability of a folder, in which students can upload their resources, the e-portfolio offers teachers a real opportunity to assess the processes of informal learning. Thus, the participation factor is guaranteed by the presence of a forum through which students can discuss, while the parameter of reiication is offered by individual or collective artifacts produced by students during the interactions and placed inside personal virtual folders. The teacher must encourage the use of an internal forum among students, in order to guarantee a minimum amount of data from which s/he can obtain a vision of the social network of learners.2

Semiformal knowledge What kind of knowledge is one in an e-portfolio (or in a PLE)? It has the distinction of being a free product, natural (and non-structured) and of individual spontaneity. This is luid. It is very similar to practice. All individuals (or most of them) involved in a CoP can understand it and enrich it, but an external user will likely have dificulty understanding concepts scattered and not yet encoded which are present in the CoP. In order to make portable informal knowledge, the encoding process is essential. But the relationship between formal and informal environments should not be stopped; the artifacts, such as tangible fruit of informal dynamics, represent a sort of temporary “solidiication” of the low of knowledge, ready for new changes, embeddings, enrichments. Knowledge is not deinitive but is “in progress”. It is offered as a representation of a dynamic phenomenon: the semiformal knowledge 2

Although the software Sociomatrix Finder 1.5 (which will be discussed later) acts directly on the forum Moodle ™ to calculate participation levels, the choice of e-portfolio with a forum is the best strategy to ensure the continuity of both the formal and informal individual learning processes.

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represented by learners’ artifacts is the static vision of a dynamic process. Semiformal knowledge may be useful for formal education programs, as a starting point for further research, as a factor capable of stimulating the students and their ability to include informal personal knowledge in the collective interest of their classroom and determines new dynamics of exchange from formal environments towards informal ones (Piave, 2008) and vice versa.

In other words, semiformal knowledge is like a semi-inished product: it is neither inished nor crude. It can be used in formal and informal settings, to ensure continuity of exchanges between two different worlds, which can communicate with each other. Researchers and teachers must be aware that you will never ever get the security of informal learning processes, because, although the semi-formal knowledge is undoubtedly the result of complex participatory and reiicative dynamics, it cannot occur, in function of the internal climate of the community. Participation and reiication are thus the necessary conditions (but not suficient) for the occurrence of informal learning.

How to measure participation in an online forum with Sociomatrix Finder (ver. 1.5) To assess informal learning, you must implement an appropriate environment in order to leave the e-learner free to explore and exchange. According to Wenger’s (1995) theory of communities of practice, each member activates two different processes: participation and reiication. The irst is based on behaviors of mutual recognition among members and — consequently — it represents a vision of the other people involved in the community as “other identities, other people” with whom you can exchange. Participation is therefore treated differently from its common meaning of “taking part” and belonging to a common process in order to obtain an overall objective. To participate, in this case, simply means seeing the other as a person, as a member of the community.

The other process, namely the reification, is the externalization of personal thoughts, the production of individual or collective elements by reason of membership in the community: in fact, the individual tasks, the personal production are — however — taken as the interaction results with the community. Participation and reiication are dual and complementary processes that ensure the negotiation of meaning, i.e. the exchange process that determines the development of an informal/tacit knowledge.

Part of this tacit knowledge, through the production of additional materials (reiication), can be translated into explicit knowledge and sent outside the community itself.

An informal setting should not feel the pressure of a teacher or a tutor and members 228

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of the community should be left alone: an outside intervention could inluence the process of the negotiation of meaning. In order to apply the above considerations, it is necessary to implement an e-Portfolio or a PLE (or other similar technologies) entrusting the management of activities to the students themselves.

Given this context, the tree of posts in the forum (or blog) represents the actual exchanges and relations among students in an environment that is free and informal: in this case the network of social relationships has a greater chance of being authentic and representative of the relations actually existing among individuals, even outside the community itself. This result is important, because in the formal setting, the presence of a teacher or a tutor can alter the birth and development of relations among learners, leading to a community centered on its leader, who is obviously the tutor.3 In an informal setting, instead, the leader can emerge spontaneously from the mutual exchanges and the reticle does not undergo the alteration of an external assigned member with the role of coordinator. In an informal network, it is likely that the role of each member represents the effective role that he possesses in reality, inside and outside the community, referring to the other members; in the formal reticle, the true role is hidden by the inluence of an assigned leader (tutor/teacher) and relations are developed in a different way and altered. Alternatively, informal settings may encourage the development of peer groups in which there is not a strong leadership, but a substantial lack of role distribution among learners, which can be comparable to a cyclic leadership or to a plain interaction among actors of the same level. The evolution of online groups in informal settings can also be inluenced by the type of assignment: if the task is collective, the existence of a role distribution is more likely and it is reasonable to expect a self-managed group; otherwise, if the task is individual, the recourse to the group is more selish and implies a lat organization among the various members, without particular roles (Piave, 2009). When the setting is formal, instead, the awareness of being observed and the more structured task can inluence the evolution of the group, forcing members to establish a strong role distribution. On the other hand, the online informal environment may not include all the activities that members can do, because they can also exchange and operate outside the boundary of the given context: thus, part of participation and reiication inevitably gets lost in the activity out of e-portfolio or PLE. But, due to the fact that the informal network of social relations is more credible and adherent to reality, what remains in the environment can be considered as representative of the whole complex of exchanges (with some limitations or approximations).

Sociomatrix Finder ver. 1.5 (SF 1.5) is software designed by me and developed, under my supervision, by Antonio Cuccurullo, which aims to translate the tree of 3

About the relation between leadership and tutorship, see: Piave, 2007.

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posts in a forum of Moodle ™ into a sociometric matrix traced according to the SNA standards. SF 1.5 is tested on Moodle ™ and can be used for the evaluation of non-formal or informal learning in virtual environments: in our evaluation approach, which refers to the informal settings, we made sure, before the participants accessed Moodle ™, to have maximum freedom in the platform, without any kind of inluence by external individuals.

In practice, SF 1.5 accesses the database of Moodle ™ and calculates the number of messages exchanged between senders and receivers within a virtual classroom.

The counting process is based on the following simple principles: – if sender and receiver coincide, their relationship is nothing; – if a sender creates a new thread, he sends this message to everyone in the reticle; – any response to a message in a discussion is sent by the author to all those members whose previous messages have a higher level of indentation in the discussion; replies to messages of the same level or lower levels of indentation are ignored (in practice, the more a post is located on the right of the tree of the post, the more it is indented; vice versa, the more a post falls to the left of the posts, the less is indented); – each relationship that is not nothing, is attributed to an increase of one unit, so it comes to determine weighted and direct network.

In some respects the previous criteria are similar to those of the rough index of depth in a forum (crude degree of depth) by Wiley (2004), already adopted in other approaches (Rossi et al., 2007) to measure participation in online communities.

While Wiley’s parameter provides a summary measure of the depth of a discussion in a forum, as it refers to a particular thread and its tree of posts, the proposed approach, which underlies the calculation of SF 1.5, is based on individual placement by the author of the messages within the social network, and is more accurate (as it makes reference to the whole forum as an expression of individual roles in the social network). Wiley’s parameter is in other words ‘impersonal’ and refers to a single thread, and if you want to calculate the average of the different degrees of depth of the various threads in a forum, it provides a more imprecise measure of the degree of individual reactivity in the online community in terms of level of participation of the individual actor or group.

The main screen of SF 1.5 (Figure 1) allows the user to set the basic parameters to access the database of Moodle ™ and gives him the option of selecting the convention that will be adopted to create the matrix. By standard convention, all the members on the top row of the matrix are the senders of the messages delivered to recipients, who are identiied in the irst column on the left (as we do here). SF 1.5 allows also to reverse the aforementioned convention between senders/recipients.

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Figure 1

Sociomatrix Finder ver. 1.5: Main Screen.

The second screen of SF 1.5 (Figure 2) allows the user to select which Moodle ™ forum the software needs to explore and the observation period (see Figure 3).

The sociometric matrix calculated by SF 1.5 is as below: This is a matrix n x n or square matrix (Table 1). It can be exported to MS Excel ™ or txt format. In the latter case, the ile can be imported into software for SNA for more

Figure 2

Sociomatrix Finder ver. 1.5: Screen for the choice of the forum.

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speciic tasks, such as the production of a sociogram and calculation of different parameters and SNA indicators. In our case, we adopted the software AGNA ™ to produce sociograms and calculate sociometric statistics. SF 1.5 also produces a rough index of participation (RPI), obtained from the ratio between Figure 3 Sociomatrix Finder ver. 1.5: detail. Posthe number of posts made by each user sibility of applying a time interval for in the forum and the total number of forum analysis. posts made by all users. Fixed as χij the single element of the matrix, we adopt the convention that the members on the column are the recipients and members in the row are the senders. The senders are speciied with i = 1, 2, 3… and recipients are speciied with j = 1, 2, 3… Furthermore, in our approach, the network of students will be weighted and directed (because the matrix cells assume different values that are not necessarily zero or one).

Evaluating informal learning in virtual learning environments: A reference model in brief After the foregoing, it is time to suggest a more complex model of assessment, which does not renounce the traditional instruments of assessment, but may expand the set of instruments with a detailed methodology for the assessment of informal learning, based on participation and reiication parameters.

The proposed model takes into account limitations regarding the impossibility of ensuring the measurement of all processes of informal learning that can be activated.

Also, while the reiication involves a necessary expression of thoughts, although of a semiformal nature, it cannot represent, for that reason alone, the evidence that a learning process has concretely and meaningfully occurred. You must demonstrate the social nature of the processes that directly or indirectly led to the production of this speciic artifact. Thus the reiication is nothing without the participation for the purposes of informal learning and vice versa. More speciically, reiication and participation are fundamental parameters (and phenomena) which represent often the presence of a process of informal learning, but cannot automatically determine the existence of informal processes on their own.

Regarding the extent of participation, it could partly use traditional known factors in the virtual formal settings, like the number of posts in the forum, the number of 232

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i = 1, 2, 3…

j = 1, 2, 3…

Sender no. 1 Receiver no. 1

Sender no. 2

Sender no. 3

0

Receiver no. 2

0

Receiver no. 3

0

Receiver no. 4

Table 1

Sender no. 4

0

Example of square sociometric matrix.

readings in the same forum, the online connection time within the environment etc (some of which are more useful in speciic formal contexts). It is possible to obtain for example a synthetic indicator of participation, giving to the rough participation index (recorded by the environment) a weighted average that takes into account all these factors.

In our case, a possible indicator of rough participation (RPI) can be represented by the relationship between the posts written by the individual user and the total number of the posts present in the forum.

(1) So, we can obtain a synthetic and raw indicator of informal involvement on the forum. But it is not suficient to measure the actual degree of participation for each student, as a high (low) number of posts may relate primarily to the production of messages that are not signiicant (very signiicant) for the educational context. It is necessary to measure not only the quantitative aspect of participation, but also transform the index into a more qualitative measure of effective participation for the processes of informal learning, applying speciic weights. Thus, Social Network Analysis techniques allow the teacher to identify and analyze the social network and ind real ties, real relationships, the actual exchanges occurring in the community: in function of each individual’s sociometric status, for example, the extent of the role that each individual has in the reticle can be established so that, in mathematical terms, it may be the right weight to be given to the previous rough index of participation.

Our evaluation model, which is under development, requires that participation of the individual user can be derived from the sum of the indices of centrality and prestige that the node has within the social network.

To measure the index of centrality (C) within the reticle, we adopt the formula (2), namely: (2)

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where g is the total number of nodes (students). The same formula expresses also the index known as weighted outdegree.

To measure the index of prestige (P) of each student, you should take the formula (3): (3) where g is the total number of nodes (students). A similar formula is represented by weighted indegree parameter which differs from prestige by the denominator: for the weighted indegree is g, instead of (g-1). So we can consider prestige and weighted indegree substantially equivalent with some approximation.

Deining the role (R) of an actor (student) as the sum of centrality and prestige, with the formula (4), then: (4) in terms of weighted indegree and outdegree, we have: (4.1) where W.I.(i) is the weighed indegree (considered equivalent to prestige) and W.O.(i) is the weighted outdegree (that is equivalent to centrality).

But the index of sociometric status SS (i) is calculated as follows: (4.2) We ind that the index of role (4) is, in other words, the index of sociometric status, as in formula (4.2).

The role played by the students has a great inluence on the group’s internal communication system: the natural leaders are recognized in a spontaneous and progressive way by other members, based on their skills and abilities demonstrated during the common activities. Imposed leaders instead must demonstrate their ability to maintain their role and provide stability to the group (Hollander, 1958; Speltini & Palmonari, 1998). In both cases, leaders must have the best levels of sociometric status, according to the position of natural communicative balance of their role. The other members who are interested in group activities should show a high level of sociometric status, lower than the leaders, but certainly higher than the sociometric status average of the group; members who have dificulty working together, or do not have enough interest, instead, should show very low levels of sociometric status, and — however — less than the average of the group. Among the interested members, it is also possible to distinguish the speciic roles that support the leader in their daily work: experts, responding to most questions from the members, with high levels of prestige; beginners, 234

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who instead, send most of the messages for the requests for information, with high centrality. Experts and beginners can be labeled as “followers� (Piave, 2009) and are characterized by a sociometric status higher than the average of group.

We can use (4) as the weight that must be applied to the rough index of participation (1), obtaining the index of effective participation (EPI) (5): (5) or, in terms of weighted outdegree and indegree, we have: (5.1) The index of effective participation (EPI) is a weighted parameter taking into account both the quantitatively individual production and the qualitative role that each student has played during the observed period. Thus, EPI is a far more accurate measure of participation than the simple role (R).

Reiication, not ignoring the path from the idea to the inal productions, is an assessment activity that looks very similar to the traditional formal evaluation. It consists, in fact, in giving a mark (on a scale) to artifacts made by learners (and their relative way of being produced), possibly using a panel of at least three experienced teachers. The average of the marks for each learner, is the reiication index (RI) of the learner (6).

(6) where v1, v2, v3 are free expressions of marks by the panel.

The result of the evaluation process thus developed is the sum of effective participation index (EPI) and the reiication index (RI), i.e. the index of informal learning (ILI) (7): (7) Therefore assessment of informal learning represents a compromise, as a result of a partial subjective evaluation of individual production (or collective, to the limit) and as such represents a limited estimate of the learning processes, part of which is beyond the control of the teacher. So, (7) should not be understood in deterministic terms.

According to the available research in the literature, the process of knowledge construction, which necessarily involves the recourse to the activation of informal learning among learners, occurs when there is a strong presence of leadership behaviors (Waters, 2008). It is reasonable to assume that leadership is related to the nature of the task assigned to the group and depends on the relationships and formal/ 235

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informal contexts in which the group grows, so the informal knowledge could also be generated by a peer group (with no signiicant role distribution). In particular, Waters, in his opinion, showed that «(…) leadership behavior is not related (in this case) to some general measure of ability or personal commitment to learning» (Waters, 2008). So, making reference to Cho, and Gay Stefanoni’s observations (Cho et al., 2002), Waters conirms the importance of sociometric centrality as a predictive parameter of “the esteem given to online peers” (Waters, 2008) Then, the index of centrality (or estimates similar to it) might be taken as a measure of leadership, but a good leader is one who can always feel the pulse of the group, being able to manage communication lows within the network of relations: for this reason sociometric status seems to be a better choice. It includes, in fact, a sort of measure of the esteem that the group members have given to the leader, not just the inverse (guaranteed by “integrated” presence of the prestige).

About the quality of individual contributions to group life, Waters points out that «it was not simply volume of messages and the number of ties that was important it was the nature of the messages that was crucial» (Waters, 2008). This observation is consistent with the concept of reiication proposed above and its way of being evaluated by a panel of teachers who not only analyze the inal product, but also the partial contribution of each member to inal production. Thus the reiication can be interpreted as the general complex of learners’ productions.

Evaluating the inclusion of informal learning production into formal educational paths The relevance of informal learning is all the greater when it creates links with traditional learning programs, because, although you must provide the concepts and structured knowledge for students, in order to ensure the acquisition of speciic skills and competencies, the part of the process of informal learning which becomes codiied and structured as a new oficial and formal knowledge, is an enrichment for the development of professionalism of the people. Therefore it is important to assess the part of informal learning that represents an added value to the knowledge of students and organizations. This qualitative measure is a teacher’s task who, through the analysis of artifacts freely made by students, can identify common elements with the formal knowledge offered in the classroom.

This implies that teachers must possess speciic skills and abilities to use web 2.0 technologies in order to effectively assess students’ skills in producing something meaningful for traditional educational programs in schools and universities. The continuous cycle of exchange between formal and informal learning processes can 236

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be ensured by the stimulation of students by teachers through activities involving the creation of multimedia artifacts on different topics and their placement in a common area within an e-portfolio. These artifacts, which were discussed by students, will soon become semiformal knowledge and will create a new production of informal learning. Indirect conirmation of this cyclic methodology is represented by microtraining (De Vries & Brall, 2008) used to engage individuals in informal learning activities in working environments.

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Piave, N.A., Paccagnella, L., Ghislandi, P., Refrigeri, G., Baldassarre, M., Iadecola, G., & Sbranati, P. (Eds.) (2008). Innovazione didattica e tecnologie per l’apprendimento online tra formale e informale. Atti del Convegno eLearningPoint, Bergamo: Sestante.

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Rossi, P.G., Giannandrea, L., & Magnoler, P. (2007). Tempi e spazi per la formazione: Un modello per l’on line. QWERTY, 1, 31-46.

Schaffert, S., & Hilzensauer W. (2008). On the way towards Personal Learning Environments: Seven crucial aspects. eLearningpapers, 9. (http://www.elearningeuropa.info/iles/media/ media15971.pdf).

Selwyn, N. (2007). Web 2.0 applications as alternative environments for informal learning – a critical review. (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/32/3/39458556.pdf).

Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. (http://www. elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm).

Speltini, G., & Palmonari, A. (1998). I gruppi sociali. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Tapscott, D., & Williams, A.D. (2006). Wikinomics. How mass collaboration changes everything, Portfolio.

Waters, J. (2008). Social Network Behavior, Thought-Leaders and Knowledge Building in an online Learning Community. Proceeding of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Science (http://www2.computer.org/plugins/dl/pdf/proceedings/ hicss/2008/3075/00/30750366.pdf?template=1&loginState=1&userData=anonymousIP%253A%253A127.0.0.1).

Wenger, E. (1995). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. New York: Cambridge Press.

Wiley, D. (2004). A Proposed Measure of Discussion Activity in Threaded Discussion Spaces. (http://opencontent.org/docs/discussion09.pdf).

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Implicit theories of teaching in socio-constructivist virtual environments A comparison of students and teachers Flavia Santoianni e Claudia Sabatano

ABSTRACT

Department of Philosophy, Naples University Federico II, Via Porta di Massa 1 – 80131 Naples. E-mail: bes@unina.it; claudia.sabatano@libero.it

The study and application of collaboration, construction and co-construction processes in learning pathways did not begin with new technologies. Far from it, it is rooted in certain pedagogic thoughts which, overall, express a cooperative view of learning, focusing on the educational value of the interaction between and among the actors in several contexts. The socio-constructivist matrix implements a pedagogy in which learning focuses on the educational meaning of the interactions between the subjects involved in the educational process and on the subject as knowledge builder, placed within a knowledge-constructing community. In this respect virtual environments seem likely to be one of the most effective places to meet the methodological and operational requirements of the socio-constructivist model. The aim of this work is to show a possible e-learning application of socio-constructivist approaches in education, namely in the education of educators.

One of the goals of the research was to study the teachinglearning relationship models and the interpretative implicit experience of students and teachers with regard to this. This study contributed to training students as well as teachers, in order to promote recognition of the various types of teaching proposed by the research by means of virtual learning environments.

Keywords: teaching and training; learning; cognitive process.

Edizioni Erickson – Trento

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Introduction The study and application of collaboration, construction and co-construction processes in learning pathways did not begin with new technologies. Far from it, it is rooted in certain pedagogic thoughts which, overall, express a cooperative view of learning, focusing on the educational value of the interaction between and among the actors in several contexts.

Current socio-constructivist theories describe knowledge as a collaborative activity, and view learning environments as spaces to be structured in such a way as to involve the subjects being educated in the knowledge-construction process.

The socio-constructivist matrix implements a pedagogy in which learning focuses on the educational meaning of the interactions between the subjects involved in the educational process and on the subject as knowledge builder, placed within a knowledge-constructing community.

Learning is learner-centred, i.e. built on the learner’s cognitive, emotional, metacognitive and social needs; it is based on the practice of dialogue as a shared attribution of meanings to facts and events and results from the individual’s action within the group. Hence a constructivist mind does not “lie” in the individual alone, but is located in social actions based on three main kinds of relations (Salomon & Perkins, 1998): – individual learning can be socially-mediated to a larger or smaller extent; – individuals can take part in a group’s learning, and sometimes what is learnt appears to be distributed across the group more than in each individual’s mind; – the individual and social aspects of learning, in both these senses, can interact over time to strengthen each other in a “mutual, spiral-shaped relationship”.

Within this model the acquisition of knowledge, competences and skills by individuals as a result of an interaction (Kaye, 1994) implies a deliberate, structured sharing of tasks and entails an agreement on common goals and values for the shared solution of a problem, which alongside a real inter-dependence among group members requires the learners’ autonomy and lexibility in the organisation of a group.

In this sense, the socio-constructivist approach seems to act not only as a teaching and educational method, but as a real pedagogical theory, which involves the whole spectrum of individual activities including and making them fully signiicant within group dynamics (Dede, 1990; Schrage, 1990). It is an active, non-competitive learning, an instrument of individualisation — because it enables different subjects to work for similar goals through different approaches — and an opportunity for integration — because it enables each and everyone to give their own contribution in situations of inter-dependence in terms of goal, role and/or task.

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The success and effectiveness of socio-constructivist learning environments largely depends also on the structure within which the processes are carried out: the shared and negotiated construction of knowledge must be supported by suitable didactic environments (Jonassen, Mayes & McAleese, 1993).

The attempt to locate the learning process in the best way may constitute an educational problem, not only in terms of methods identiied or strategies chosen but also with reference to the context within which each and every educational project may express itself in the most effective manner. In this respect virtual environments seem likely to be one of the most effective places to meet the methodological and operational requirements of the socio-constructivist model.

Current research on virtual socio-constructivist learning environments shows a growing interest in methodologies characterised by a two-way, interactive communication and a free exchange of information in synchronous and asynchronous modes, the educational effectiveness of these proposals being guaranteed by cooperation to achieve common goals, by cultural exchange and social interaction.

The aim of this work is to show a possible e-learning application of socio-constructivist approaches in education1, namely in the education of educators (Frauenfelder & Santoianni, 2006).

In the framework of the experimentation carried out for this research work, reference was especially made to three major learning macro-models (Santoianni & Striano, 2003) having a behaviourist, cognitivist and post-cognitivist matrix (socioculturalist, constructivist and meta-relexive).

The behaviourist, cognitivist and post-cognitivist epistemological matrices made up the theoretical framework which has affected the theories and practices of education since last century and up to the present day, representing the result of a series of paradigmatic positions about the nature of learning and teaching.

Each of these currents of thought expresses a pedagogical theory of learning, but also an approach to didactics (Santoianni & Sabatano, 2007), an expressive practice of teaching that the teacher adopts in a more or less explicit or intentional way and that the student, similarly, perceives and considers.

Objectives and research description One of the goals of the research was to study the teaching-learning relationship models and the interpretative experience of students and teachers with regard to this.

1

The experimental training programme constitutes an integral part of an interdisciplinary research study carried out in the fields of pedagogy and medical pedagogy (Brascio et al., 2006).

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This study contributed to training students as well as teachers, in order to promote recognition of the various types of teaching proposed by the research by means of virtual learning environments.

The types of teaching considered include, in particular, those of the behaviourist teacher, the cognitivist teacher and, in the post-cognitivist category, the meta-relexive, the constructivist and the socio-culturalist teacher.

The story presented to the subjects — teachers and students alike — was constructed in such a way as to represent the possible imaginary tale of a student on completion of his or her studies who, in remembering his/her teachers, conveys several naïve and common sense theories through his/her narration.

These theories, which were specially designed to this aim, were later detected by both students and teachers. The objective was that, after sharing the considerations which emerged, the possible meanings attributed were negotiated using a socioconstructivist methodology.

With students, a speciic meaning was given to the theories which the class, as a learning community, wished to bring together in designing the igure of an ‘ideal’ teacher, still in the sense of a situated model. With teachers, instead, a debate was opened on the interpretation given by the teachers themselves through the research platform to the teaching models proposed and which could be explicitly or implicitly inferred from the naïve common sense theories embedded in the “story”.

In this case, however, the inal objective was not to identify a model of ideal teacher, but to discuss, together with the teachers, the various teaching models acknowledged by the literature and to have the teachers carry out meta-relexive actions to recognise their own teaching method by comparing the personal implicit and common sense theories with the relevant scientiic theories and using a critical, relexive approach to the analysis of the various models.

Methodology The experimental model explores the combined use of the development potential of the DKN (Dynamic Knowledge Networks) software (Giani & Martone, 1998) and of the research platform DVLN (Dynamic Virtual Learning Networks) (Giani, 2004) that was implemented by the Computational Medicine Lab at the Faculty of Medicine of Naples University Federico II (http://elearning.medicina.unina.it/ DVLN) as a possible example of socio-constructivist approach to the management of knowledge construction, namely the knowledge-transfer processes of textual forms to the visual-spatial models of individual and collective representation in the virtual framework.

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Indeed, one of the features of the research platform DVLN is its possibility to upload documents — in particular, the choice was to use a common sense story, drawing on the previous experimental line (Brascio et al., 2006) — and to analyse them, once they had been published on the site, by way of a monitoring system based on text decoding. Such decoding is done by breaking the texts up into portions that can be labelled and whose later spatial coding has been enabled by the use of the DKN software for the construction of dynamic knowledge networks.

The platform DVLN also makes it possible to provide information on the course proile, on the teachers and the tutoring instruments, including a mailing list and the possibility to make up discussion groups on speciic topics.

Therefore, the distance learning platform DVLN was used to form a virtual class including 185 students in the course of General Pedagogy within the degree course in Psychology of relational and developmental processes (pre-service training). Alongside the virtual class of students was a virtual class of secondary school teachers, in a teacher’s refresher course held at the schools ITIS Righi and Ottavo in Naples (in-service training).

Indeed, the experiment presented in this work was done simultaneously with university students and secondary school teachers.

The methodology used to construct the “story” was that of theory theory, which envisages developing shifts from implicit, naïve, folk theories to shared and sharable ones, through training processes including the validation, transformation or revision of the theories themselves (Wellman, 1990; Carruthers & Smith, 1995; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 2000).

The shift from naïve to structured, formal and scientiic knowledge involves a circular process made up of continuous, two-way pathways going from learning modes to teaching modes or, better, from the theoretical learning models, which are culturally determined and able to give teaching a pedagogic orientation, to the educational practices which, becoming part of these theoretical models, offer new directions to analysis and perspectives for the study of learning processes starting from naïve, experience-based knowledge.

At the experimental level of the research there was an alternation of personal understanding and collective sharing of meanings, an alternation of online learning and stand alone learning, and an alternation in the use of spatial representations and textual analyses.

Result analysis As far as the experimental level is concerned, the Caro Diario story was entered in the platform DVLN and in the irst phase, which was carried out in the classroom 243

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by the teacher and the students, the text of the story was read out with a following explanation of the irst teaching model (maths teacher — behaviourist teacher).

In the second phase the students read the text of the Caro Diario story online on the platform DVLN and selected, from DVLN, a few labels in the story based on the folk theories or naïve theories they had developed on teaching models, only the irst of which had already been explained in the classroom.

In the third phase, working online, the teacher compared the labels given by the students (DVLN function see codes) with the selected excerpts of text they referred to (DVLN function edit codes) in order to analyse the code/text relation and study the use of folk or naïve theories by the students with respect to the models presented.

This phase was followed, in the classroom, by the reading and sharing of the labels identiied by individual students and by the acknowledgement of labels as codes attributed to the various teaching models. Afterwards the codes were put to the vote and shortlisted in order to move towards what the class later described as the model of ideal teacher shared by the learning community.

In the fourth phase scientiic theories were explained in the classroom by using the deinitions of teaching models provided in the literature which the codes expressed by the students had referred to, in a folk or naïve way.

Still in the classroom, the codes expressed were divided into three categories for each model: theories to be validated, theories to be transformed and theories to be given up.

This work led to the formulation of some theories shared by the learning community.

In the ifth phase the new interpretative hypotheses and possible codes emerged were discussed and monitored. This led to the proposal to deine an interpretative model agreed on by the learning community as a whole (ideal teacher model).

In the sixth phase the students answered the question «how would you describe your ideal teacher?» online, in the forum available on the platform DVLN. In the seventh phase, then, the preferences expressed by the students were analysed in the DVLN forum with the aim of deining an interpretative model agreed on by the whole community based on the discussion topics raised in the forum and on the codes chosen.

The eighth phase was carried out in the classroom, with a socialisation of the codes which had been chosen individually and then shared and discussed, alongside some other considerations on the subject — in the DVLN forum — to reach a shared deinition of ideal teacher (Table 1).

The ninth phase concerned the use of the codes identiied by the class meant as a learning community as the possible representative deinitions of the “ideal teacher” model making up the basic constituents in the individual construction of a visualspatial map with the aid of the experimental software DKN. In the tenth phase the students sent the teacher of the course an individual DKN visual-spatial map about their own “ideal teacher” model, integrating the codes de244

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scribed as being representative of the class/learning community with one or more constituents, personally chosen among one’s codes.

In the eleventh phase the whole experimental pathway was repeated for the teachers in service (Table 2).

Results The subjects involved in this research showed wide margins in their ability to identify and recognise the educational models, and a signiicant relexive quality in considering the teaching-learning dynamics. The teachers and students identiied the three macro-models described in the story, recognising the main directions that these follow.

The behaviourist model was recognised as a traditional, though not traditionalist model, focused on the idea of rules to convey and to be acquired, in which the stimulus-response mechanism becomes centred on praise and punishment as intentionally conveyed to support the acquisition of shared and shareable behavioural and cognitive patterns.

With regard to the cognitivist framework, the teachers recognised a model in which learning is viewed as the elaboration of mental processes based on the organisation of strategies and on the signiicance of information. The teacher chooses explanation and comprehension to convey sequences of instructions and to provide the student with a preparation targeted to the task. The educator is viewed as a guide who structures and adapts the learning contents and, through the practice of repetition, arranges the contents by increasing levels of dificulty, following a cumulative transmission of knowledge and taking into account the subjects’ inner cognitive structuring.

As a whole, the various branches of the post-cognitivist model — constructivist, culturalist and meta-relexive — seem to be collectively deined as being related to an advanced, more up-to-date and didactically effective approach. The teachers in particular seem to express a greater degree of acceptance of this model, recognising it as the one in which to identify at best or towards which to tend. In general terms, the teachers show a preference for this model, which is viewed as an alternative to the previous approaches.

Discussion The teachers saw the lack of empathic practices and of attention for the emotional sphere as essential traits of the behaviourist model, which is somehow experienced 245

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Students and the model of ideal teacher Enhancement, formulation and respect of personal ideas and individual diversity

19

Stimulating, thought-provoking teacher and mediator

17

Collaboration, construction, exchange and group work

12

Reflection and self-assessment

11

Constantly re-thinking one’s teaching

10

Experience, exploration, activity, flexibility and adaptation to the environment

10

Peer teacher-learner relationship

9

Freedom of expression and emotionality

8

Importance of the raising environment and of the learning context

6

Practice

6

Teacher as guide, model and emotional leader

5

Inner motivation

4

Strictness and discipline

4

Gradual learning by increasing levels of difficulty

4

Planning of objectives

3

Learning strategies and personal study method

3

Significant and personal learning

2

Education

1

Table 1

The ideal teacher model for students. DVLN codes shared by the learning community of students in the DVLN forum about the model of ideal teacher. The numbers on the side are the marks given to the codes chosen by the students in the DVLN forum.

as being overdesigned and over-orienting and, however, able — thanks to this — to give greater conidence to those who adopt it. The exploration of this model also highlighted the low degree of personalisation of learning pathways and the educational offer’s failure to adapt to the students’ needs and characteristics, which is mirrored by the opposite idea that it is not possible to “change” students.

When describing the ideal teacher, instead, the students did not stress the elements qualifying the behaviourist teaching model very much, attributing an extremely marginal space to elements like practice, the idea of education as instruction, discipline and strictness as the style of the educational relationship, the planning of learning objectives. In doing so they did not consider some crucial elements of the behaviourist model at all, such as the system of supports in teaching and the transmitting-imitative quality of learning.

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Teachers and teaching models Control Emotion Fear Threat Does not convey the joy of learning Presumption Behaviourist teacher

Excessive self-confidence Strict Praise Traditional method Traditional teaching Failure to tune to the class (Changing students) wrong Collaborative learning Spirit of collaboration (Learning to study) important, truth (Motivation) primary objective of learning

Meta-reflexive teacher

Freedom of expression Unrestrained expression Right method More advanced method Fundamentally similar methods What about the heart?

(Arranging contents in an easy to difficult scale) good teacher Learning viewed as an automatic process

Cognitivist teacher Guidance Complex diversity (Able to learn and solve any problem) difficult (Sharing theories) together Constructivist teacher

Sharing experiences Flexible, non-passive Student-centred

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Concreteness Model Identity Culturalist teacher Awareness Excess of participation Justifying one’s failures

Table 2

The teaching models from the teachers’ perspective. DVLN codes shared by the teachers in the DVLN forum about various teaching models.

The aspects that the students picked up from the cognitivist model in designing the igure of the ideal teacher concern the idea of teacher as guide and model in the learning pathway and in the arrangement and presentation of knowledge following a gradual approach by increasing levels of dificulty, of learning as a signiicant, personal attribution of meaning to contents. In the proile that teachers and students draw to represent this model there seems to be a shared idea of a learning dynamic focusing on the cognitive aspects, which is deprived of a “heart”, is forgetful of the affective, emotional and relational aspects of the educational process: a model which has structured contents and which in turn structures increasingly complex meanings that are offered to the learners in a cumulative way for the development of problem solving competences.

The teachers view the post-cognitivist approach as being linked to speciic knowledge contexts and to co-construction, exchange and meaning and experience negotiation dynamics, aiming at constructing lexible, collaborative learning communities based on the distribution of knowledge, on the sharing of experiences and on the enhancement of individual speciicities. The shift from the individual to the social level becomes essential, and is nurtured by the use of mediated and shared discursive practices; the meta-relexive level is considered as an area of awareness of the possibilities and limits of the knowledge process and of the actors involved in it, meant as the ability to learn to study and to recognise the inner motivations about learning.

The students as well express a strong sharing of the post-cognitivist paradigm, describing the ideal teacher as a mediator of knowledge and facilitator of learning, ready to revise and adjust his/her teaching along the way and to construct a symmetrical relationship with the students. Learning is regarded as a collaborative, active and explorative process within which individual differences, different ideas and experiences can be expressed freely and socialised through shared pathways.

Very importantly, the motivational and emotional aspects take on a central role, thus constituting one of the main levers of the educational action meant as the eman-

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cipating possibility of the subject in speciic socio-cultural contexts. This proile is combined with the sensitiveness towards a meta-relexive discourse — although understood and described in general terms — which the students relate to the ability of acquiring an awareness of their own learning strategies and of developing selfassessing and self-regulating competences on the individual learning methods.

Conclusions Although it constitutes a space able to make up a concrete basis for the setting up of cooperative learning environments, technological mediation tends to modify the dynamics of educational and training interaction.

Virtual environments seem to require the use of different methodologies and a change in teaching styles, because interaction modes, ways to present information and evaluate the meanings of the messages provided are different. The use of new technologies in the construction of learning environments makes it necessary, therefore, to re-deine the categories of analysis and re-design the relationship and interaction modes needed to interpret the encounter of the new communicative languages with the forms of their expressive material nature, which supports the construction and de-construction of communication meanings and codes and requires a re-functionalisation of the possibilities of interaction as compared to those offered by the new media.

The construction of virtual spaces where learning and teaching go on to constitute new forms of communication of a virtual nature seems, at the same time, to be able to cause a different cognitive and emotional structuring of the learning processes (Santoianni & Sabatano, 2005) as well as to implement and shape new modalities of teaching relations even within existing pedagogical models.

In naĂŻve knowledge, therefore, the models devised are described as opposing, inished and static, whereas in the pedagogical literature (Santoianni, 2008) they are considered a non-exhaustive list of the complex spectrum of theories on learning.

Some of these have very similar characters, others can only be interpreted through comparison, they are open and dynamic, i.e. to be analysed by both framing them in their original contexts and putting them in a relationship with the latest outcomes of research.

References Brascio, G., Bruzzese, D., Cunti, A., Giani, U., Iavarone, M.L., Lo Presti, F., Sabatano, C., Sabatano, F., & Santoianni, F. (2006). DVLN e DKN. Modelli visuo-spaziali di rappre-

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sentazione e sviluppo dei signiicati nella formazione a distanza. Un approccio multidisciplinare. In A. Pozzali (Ed.) (2006), Conoscenza senza distanze. Scenari ed esperienze per l’e-learning (pp. 85-116). Milano: Guerini.

Carruthers, P., & Smith, P. (Eds.) (1995). Theories of Theory of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dede, C.J. (1990). The Evolution of Distance Learning: Technology-Mediated Interactive Learning. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 22 (3), 247-264.

Frauenfelder, E., & Santoianni, F. (2006). E-Learning, teorie dell’apprendimento e modelli della conoscenza. Milano: Guerini.

Giani, U. (Ed.) (2004). Reti dinamiche di apprendimento a distanza. Napoli: Liguori.

Giani, U., & Martone, P. (1998). Dynamic knowledge network, problem based learning and distance learning. Int. J. Medical Informatics, 50 (1), 273-278.

Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A.N. (2000). Costruire il mondo. Una teoria dello sviluppo cognitivo.

Milano: McGraw-Hill.

Jonassen, D., Mayes, T., & McAleese, R. (1993). A manifesto for a constructivist approach to uses of technology in higher education. In T.M. Duffy, J. Lowick & D. Jonassen (Eds.), Designing Environments for Constructive Learning (pp. 231-247). Heidelberg: SpringerVerlag.

Kaye, A. (1994). Apprendimento collaborativo basato su computer. Tecnologie didattiche, 4, 9-21.

Salomon, G., & Perkins, D. (1998). Individual and Social Aspects of Learning. Review of Research in Education, 23, 1-24.

Santoianni, F. (2008). E-Learning is What Kind of Learning? In A. Cartelli (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of Information and Communication Technology (Section: Context ICT, pp. 1-6).

U.S.A.: Idea-Group.

Santoianni, F., & Sabatano, C. (2005). Sistemi percettivi e ambienti virtuali. Prospettive embodied per l’e-learning? In M. Delino, S. Manca, D. Persico, & L. Sarti (Eds.), Come costruire conoscenza in rete? (pp. 91-97). Ortona: Edizioni Menabò.

Santoianni, F., & Sabatano, C. (Eds.) (2007). Brain Development in Learning Environments.

Embodied and Perceptual Advancements. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Santoianni, F., & Striano, M. (2003). Modelli teorici e metodologici dell’apprendimento.

Roma-Bari: Laterza. (Spanish version Santoianni, F., & Striano, M., Modelos teóricos y metodológicos de la enseñanza, Messico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2006).

Schrage, M. (1990). Shared minds: s new technologies of collaboration. New York: Random House.

Wellman, H.M. (1990). The Child’s Theory of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Experiential and narrative elements in the learning processes Digital storytelling as a cultural re-elaboration practice Gabriella Taddeo

ABSTRACT

Department Casa-Città – DICAS, College of Architecture, Polytechnic University of Turin, Via Boggio 31/a – 10129 Turin. E-mail: gabriella.taddeo@polito.it

Nowadays, storytelling is considered not only as an interesting tool for contents, values, cultural practices re-elaboration, but also as a means for socializing and sharing knowledge.

Through stories, “sketches”, tales, in fact, a considerable amount of formal and informal knowledge is shared both in small institutions and enterprises and in big ones (Salmon, 2007).

In this paper, storytelling will be investigated as a laboratory activity for students: an experimental environment — based on 2.0 web tools that allow students to produce contents and to create simple “narrative scenarios” — will be analysed.

Through the scenarios, formal, impersonal notions can be transformed into stories, personal re-elaborations, and they can be enriched by colours, psychology, as well as experiential depth. Furthermore, the elaboration of a storytellingbased learning methodology allows us to carry out interesting analyses from the instructional design point of view: from the development of the teacher’s role up to the relation between learning practices and media consumption.

In fact, the “ictional” dimension created by storytelling can be associated to media education practices and learning contents can be analytically and critically compared with media stories, stereotypes and the whole implicit knowledge deriving from media landscape.

Keywords: experiential learning; storytelling; media education; participation; lifelong learning.

Edizioni Erickson – Trento

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Storytelling as a re-elaboration practice Nowadays, storytelling is considered not only an interesting tool for the re-elaboration of content, values, cultural practices, but also a means for socializing and sharing knowledge.

In the last few decades it has been studied by several disciplines and approaches: it plays a central role in philosophical and semiotic thought (Barthes 1973; Greimas 1983; Eco 1979); psychologists have investigated its importance as a cognitive and mnemonic tool (Bruner 1986); from a more speciically sociological viewpoint, stories have been interpreted as means for individual social framing experiences (Bateson 1979); other scholars have focused on media stories, outlining how ictional tv stories play a powerful role in modelling, in addition to representing perceived reality (Gerbner, 1985).

In the educational sector, narrative thought has been analysed as an essential instrument for enhancing processes of relection (Maturana et al., 1987), and storytelling experiments have been carried out in pre-school settings as well as in lifelong learning processes. Recently, many scholars explored digital storytelling as an innovative “2.0 method” for improving professional and educational learning contexts (Petrucco & De Rossi, 2009).1 Finally, storytelling has also been studied for its emotional power, its ability to promote values and engage people through shared emotional structures, often more effective than rational ones in inspiring political, ideological and even professional feelings (Salmon, 2007).

Context and research aims Starting from this brief theoretical outline about the role of storytelling as cognitive, emotional and social instrument of knowledge, in the following pages the main elements of an experimental digital storytelling environment will be presented, in order to analyse the beneits and constraints of digital storytelling practice in lifelong learning contexts.2 1

2

As, for example the Center for Digital Storytelling (http://www.storycenter.org), or the project Creative Narrations (http:// www.creativenarrations.net), or, in UE area, the experience Untold Stories, aimed at favouring intercultural exchanges (www.untoldstories.eu).

According to UE definition (European Community Commission, 2001) lifelong learning is defined as «all learning activity, formal or informal, undertaken throughout life, with the aim of enhancing knowledge, skills and competencies from a personal, civic, social and/or employment-related perspective». Normally the lifelong learning concept includes three types of learning activity: formal learning, that is developed in structured contexts (e.g. schools, universities), non-formal learning, that occurs in non-institutional settings (such as associations, NGOs, political parties), and, lastly, informal learning, that refers to all implicit knowledge which people acquire in the workplaces, in daily life and media consumption activities.

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The experimentation is part of the Co-operare PRIN Project,3 research aimed at investigating practices, technologies and interfaces for the reuse of cultural content: in this direction, a technological platform is being developed to investigate solutions and interfaces for creatively merging institutional contents coming from historical cultural archives, and bottom-up content coming from participatory practices of web 2.0.

Within the platform, the digital storytelling environment will constitute a speciic research issue, developed in cooperation with CSI Piemonte4 learning group, and aimed at exploring participatory practices in lifelong learning contexts.

This digital storytelling experimentation is based on a speciic course CSI offers, entitled Legal Aspects of Internet in work contexts: this course was considered the most appropriate, both for its universality that enables it to appeal to a very wide audience, and for its many links to informal content, languages and stories coming from media iction (e.g. ilms and teleilms that deal with privacy on the internet, on-line relationships, hacking, software piracy and other identity and social issues in the internet era).

This course was therefore the ideal situation to experiment with innovative teaching practices in which formal knowledge, “latent” knowledge coming from media consumption and bottom-up knowledge of user generated contents can merge and creatively interact.

Based on the above-mentioned technologies and contents, the speciic tasks of digital storytelling experimentation are: – to experiment with methods of re-use of didactic material, that will allow educational institutions (e.g. universities, public as well as private corporations) to exploit, personalize and dynamically enrich their accumulated educational content; – to develop participatory practices that allow users to exercise a more complete degree of creativity and appropriation with regard to that content; – to create a dynamic dialogue between formal (e.g. learning contents) and informal knowledge, as for example myths, stories and beliefs that people absorb during media consumption.

Finally, the digital storytelling environment attempts to innovate professional digital settings and e-learning interfaces, in order to bring digital experiences provided by professional work stations, closer to informal practices of web browsing and digital entertainment that users are inclined to practice in their daily lives.

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Information about the PRIN (Project of Relevant National Interest) coordinated by prof. Mario Ricciardi, can be found at URL: http://nexos.cisi.unito.it/joomla/cooperare/.

CSI Piemonte, one of the institutional research partners of the Co-operare Project, is a consortium of public bodies which promotes innovation in the Public Administration through ICT technologies. In the educational sector, it provides training for over 5,000 Piedmont Region employees, using a blended learning system based on online and face-toface activities. Information on the CSI learning group, coordinated by Lella Testaceni, can be found at URL: http:// www.formazionepiemonte.org.

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Thus, a digital storytelling environment will support the following characteristics: – open architecture, able to support a growing amount of user generated content and integrate it with institutional didactic content, while maintaining clear traceability and distinction among different sources and content typologies; – the ability to connect didactic material with media content coming from different sources, such as television archives, as well as from web libraries (e.g. video, photos or music from web 2.0 sites); – tools for improving different interaction strategies (one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many interaction) that enable users to participate, discuss and appropriate peer-to-peer learning contents; – web 2.0 interfaces and interaction features, able to attract users and to bring learning closer to leisure and entertainment experiences.

Experimentation, which started in March 2009, will provide not only an on-line prototype design and implementation, but also user testing with inal users.

From notions to experiences: The scenario technique To include storytelling practices in the learning environment and bring didactic activities closer to concrete daily life experiences, the technique of scenarios will be implemented and speciic methodologies will be acted out. The scenario notion, derived from cognitive psychology and symbolic framing interaction theories (Goffman, 1959), has been empirically adopted in several professional ields and has been developed speciically in participatory design techniques.

Calvani and Bonaiuti (Bonaiuti, 2006, p. 127), focusing on scenarios for instructional design innovation, deine them as: «a representation, as realistic as possible, of a situation than can occur under particular conditions or in the future».

For instance, in the CSI course, once the didactic notion of a “privacy violation” has been explored, students are invited to elaborate a scenario in which this type of violation takes place in their daily, professional life.

Scenarios allow students to re-elaborate initial notions from a personal point of view, linking them to concrete contexts and exploring possible problems and solutions through an in-depth setting in realistic situations.

At the present time, especially for lifelong learning activities, it is extremely important to take learning content out of the abstract dimension of “notions” to a more concrete dimension that is immediately connected to daily life experience and practice.

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Some characteristics that should be considered in scenario development are: – to set the scenario in a realistic context, as close as possible to effective daily practices and experiences; – in this context, to it a fact that is directly connected to the topic (e.g. privacy violation) and to create, in this manner, an episode that works as a “break-through point” both in the narration and in previous knowledge; – to explore the break-through consequences of the narrative from several points of view such as legal, professional, psychological and relational aspects.

Scenario design needs to enable the students to overcome an impersonal learning dimension and embody abstract notions into their own experience.

Therefore, the scenario aims at creating, from an initial learned notion, a story that gives it shape, colour, psychology or experiential depth.

The CSI, in the past, has developed such edutainment experiments, using for example the “serious games” model in order to improve learning and role-playing skills.

The game “Searching for precious minerals”, for example, allowed each participant to choose the role to play and to make decisions, according to the role constraints,

Figure 1

“Searching for the precious minerals”, a serious game, developed by CSI Piemonte, which uses narrative techniques in order to improve transversal skills.

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about attitudes and behaviours to adopt in different situations. During the game, a console showed the score in relation to each skill improved: problem solving, acquisition of roles and responsibilities, team working and negotiation skills.

Compared to such experimentation, the current digital storytelling prototype stresses web 2.0 and a participatory cultural dimension, proposing a learning model based on many-to-many interaction, media re-use and mash-up and user generated content contribution.

The collective and socialized storytelling dimension in learning environments Connection of the scenario with a cooperative working tool, such as a forum, facilitates the passage from an individual to a social learning experience, promoting collective critical re-elaboration and learned content discussion.

The experimental learning environment will allow users to present their scenarios in a shared space and propose them as open stories to discuss with the other community members.

The community is invited to comment on the story, express their opinions about the characters involved and their actions (who made a mistake, when, why…), suggest possible solutions to the “break-through” episode and, at the end, help the author to deine a suitable ending for the story.

The Teacher’s role: From content designer to story designer In this learning model, the teacher’s role is profoundly reconigured as are requisite skills and activities.

It is important to stress that many times in e-learning environments the teacher’s role is covered by different igures that interact and often overlap with each other, such as: – the content expert, who designs content or provides necessary notions and materials to create them; – the main teacher, who has to “actualize” didactic content in different learning spaces and moments (e.g. face-to-face lessons, on line conferences and so on); – the tutor, who helps and operatively supports students in the learning processes.

In the digital storytelling environment, the teacher (with the above described triple role) should complete the stories with necessary information and “technical” 256

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instructions, control the correctness of certain narrative solutions or choices, maintain narrations in the “realistic” and “possible” boundaries, furnish consultancy in order to solve a problem or a narrative “empasse”.

Thus the teacher takes the role of “story designer”, a narrative orchestrator who is able to indicate in different stages the possibilities and constraints5 of the story and link them to the semantic sphere of the learning topic.

Scenario re-use: Relations between media and knowledge The addition of speciic stories — which are created and cultivated by the learning community — to course topics, acquires value and importance not only for students who are directly involved in the activity, but also for those who come after.

A library of situations, experiences, stories and discussions is continuously incremented, forming an innovative, dynamic archive of case studies.

Moreover, the ictional dimension, which is created through scenarios, allows teachers to extend the learning objective to media education activities in which media myths, characters, narrations and beliefs are critically opened and de-constructed in a guided knowledge framework.

In this manner, the lifelong learning ield tries to ind links and comparisons with the neighbouring and often contaminating media world, its beliefs and knowledge systems,6 experimenting methods to manage knowledge and implicit mis-information coming from the media in a creative, and not censorial, way, so as to embrace, in the learning processes, participatory culture and web 2.0.

From theory to practice: Instructional design draft Starting from this brief theoretical overview, a basic outline of the interaction architecture and interface follows below. Its purpose is to visualize future development and implementation.

The low-chart in Figure 2 illustrates each step of the storytelling process. A few project drafts are also described from page 7 to 9 to provide a clear view of the interface.

5 6

About the role of constraints in guiding interaction processes it is useful to refer to classic Norman studies (1988).

An example could be the role of fiction for the CSI in spreading notions and information about first aid, human anatomy and so on.

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Didactic unit

V1. Professional setting choice

V2. Charachters definition

V7. Didactic resumes

Multimedia (institutional media archives)

V3. Storytelling instructions

VY. Tutor interaction V8. User generated stories repository

VX. Community interaction

V7. Definitiv story closing

Figure 2

V4. Story creation

V5. Story uploading

V6. Multimedia final scene creation

Prototypal low-chart of storytelling environment.

In the diagram, light grey indicates “static” content — which represents the institutional part of the course — elaborated by teachers: in this example we will consider privacy violation, developed as a topic of the CSI course.

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The dark grey areas describe interaction spaces, with the tutor and/or other students; these areas are also indicated by square parentheses: communicative exchanges are always possible and they are not limited to speciic learning settings or times.

The dotted areas deine user generated contents: they show incremental content that continuously adds to and enriches the institutional content in the learning space.

The cylindrical area indicates the link to the multimedia database provided by the Co-operare project archive: it is the gateway to multimedia content (e.g. photos, videos, songs, documents) — coming from different archives — that can be used for contextualising notions in daily life in line with the course theme and/or narrative.

Design outlines for interaction In the following pages, each low-chart step (corresponding to each box in Figure 2) will be described more in depth: each step will be called a screenshot, bearing in mind that in the subsequent implementation phase many steps could be covered by a single screenshot and vice-versa.

Screenshot 1: Professional setting choice In this step the user chooses the professional setting from a series of templates (e.g. different ofice styles: yuppy, blasé, modern and so on) in which to set the story.

Screenshot 2: Characters definition In this phase the user can choose from a library of characters to involve in the story. According to Greimas’ classical actantial model (1979), the available character types useful to create a simple but functional narrative structure, will be: – main role (e.g. a shy employee); – antagonist (e.g. a spiteful colleague); – helper (e.g. a friend or colleague); – judge (e.g. the boss).

Brief description cards describe temperament, style and distinguishing characteristics of each character, providing a draft of the narrative atmosphere and helping the user to imagine and locate the characters and their possible narrative development.

Screenshot 3: Storytelling instructions In this step simple but clear instructions are provided to users in order on how to create their story.

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Here below a sample of storytelling guidelines is proposed: Everything was going on as usual at work… but… that day…

Now write your own story! Tell us how your characters deal with a privacy violation episode. Clicking on the zoom icon (link to V7), ind speciic technical information on privacy violations (and also the link to the complete didactic unit).

The ingredients of your story should be: – the characters you chose, with their personalities, problems and daily lives; – a privacy violation episode; – different reactions to the episode, by both the perpetrator and the victim’s possible developments and consequences.

If you want, you may read the sample story (link to V8)7 or browse the user generated content gallery and read the stories that other community members have written about this topic.

On a dedicated console, chosen characters and narrative settings are always available and allow users to pick up elements and inspiration for story creation.

Screen shot 8: Archive of narrative samples In this screenshot the user inds initial samples and can access stories that other learning community members have created on the topic.

From an interaction design point of view, it is important to avoid an “empty” narrative environment in order to encourage users to express themselves and to overcome the horror vacui of the irst writing effort.

Screenshot 4: Uploading the story In this phase the users upload their stories in the community space. A story need not be completed before being uploaded: in fact, users can decide to upload an incomplete story in order to submit it to other community members and ask their cooperation in inding an appropriate ending.

7

A sample story can be provided to facilitate a hypothetical narrative development: «Simona was really jealous… yes…

Franco was married… she knew that very well… and he never thought of leaving his family for her… but now, something had changed… Franco had something in his mind. She had to do something, she wanted to find out what was going on… So that Friday, when everyone was out for lunch, as usual, she pretended to have a headache and she stayed in the office to check her lover’s email… She found some strange e-mails… who was Nicole?? She wanted revenge…

When Franco came back from the break, she attacked him in front of all the colleagues and she asked him for explanations crying and shouting… But Franco was cold, colder than usual, he told her she was a crazy paranoid to dig into his personal affairs… she acted like a criminal… reading his e-mails had been a really serious mistake, an unforgivable mistake… For this reason he wanted to inform the boss, and then, maybe, discuss the matter with a lawyer as he was really disgusted by her obsessive behaviour.

Simona was panicking… what could happen at work? Franco really wanted, and above all, could, ruin her for this stupid mistake? (To be continued…)».

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Screenshots x and y: Community and tutor interaction After it is uploaded, the story acquires a standard format, created by the automatic assembly of different templates and items chosen and created by the user.

A brief animation creates the professional setting and introduces the chosen characters; after a fade, the written text of the story is shown.

Community members can post their comments on the story, debating and laming around it as in fan iction practices.8 Furthermore, the tutor can provide notions or technical guidelines if some of the narrative episodes have an unclear development or need further speciic data.

Users can also add photos, videos or other media content that they have taken from the multimedia database.

Screenshot 5: Multimedia closing of the story Finally, the user can complete the story through the creation of one or more animated scenes.

Figure 3 8

DFILM. Balloons and animated scenes based story-maker.

For an overview on fan fiction studies see Hills (2002).

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Screenshot 5: Closure of the story Finally, users can complete stories through the creation of one or more animated scenes.

The DFILM tool, by Moviemaker, can be considered an interesting model, very useful for its simplicity.

In this lash web site, users can create a brief animated story, based on balloons and animated scenes.

The users choose which characters to involve in each scene; then they select a scene type (e.g. rendezvous; dialogue; soliloquy and so on) and write the balloon text for each character. After closing the irst scene they can pass to another one and so on. At the end of the process, the tool animates all the scenes, thus resulting in a little narrative sequence.

Screenshot 6. Definitive story closure At the end of the storytelling process the user can close the story and submit it for teacher evaluation.

Actually, however, as shown in the low chart, it will always be possible to perform certain activities on the story, such as: – link the story to new multimedia items; – link the story to further notions or didactical contents; – link the story to other stories (based for example on the same character or topic); – discuss the story in the community.

Conclusions As we have observed from this irst instructional design draft, a “limited degree of freedom” has been chosen for the interaction processes: users are not completely free (or alone) in elaborating the story, but pass through guided steps — e.g. templates for the professional setting and character choice — to free zones in which they are completely independent in the creative elaboration.

The choice not to offer a more open participatory model was partially based on the following considerations: – a completely open interaction model, though it may be considered more suitable for advanced users (e.g. blog authors, web 2.0 users, etc.), could be dificult to cope with for users unaccustomed to writing and working creatively in daily life; – offering templates and models, besides providing a comforting cognitive space for users, its in with a contemporary creative paradigm based on pastiche and 262

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collage (Manovich, 2001), and brings the learning processes closer to the game environment of videogames (in which a great deal of time is often spent in the game environment setting): this is coherent with one of the research aims, that is to merge formal and informal activities in the learning processes; – from a narrative viewpoint, the use of structured characters, standardized formulas and themes (Ong, 1982), allows teachers to achieve better control of the storytelling process; furthermore, a higher degree of uniformity and comparability among stories is useful for comparison and debate within the community, as well as for the construction of serial chains.

Finally, though we do not yet have empirical indings about the experimental test prototype, it is useful to try to pinpoint some of the critical issues that a similar environment could generate, inviting further in-depth analyses: 1. This learning environment requires an active role and new interactive attitudes both for teachers and students: although these creative dynamics are encouraged by the rise of web 2.0 environments, it is important to be careful and to consider the real percentage of participatory users on the net (Ricciardi & Bossi, 2009).

2. The willingness to exceed the boundaries in learning processes between formal learning and informal knowledge delivered by the media must take into account the necessary didactic practices, providing students with tools and criteria for distinguishing and evaluating each source, clear information about their reliability, updating and institutionality: only in this manner will it be possible to develop a convergent culture (Jenkins, 2006) as a means for improving a multidimensionality of culture rather than lattening it.

3. The radical change in learning processes needs to be accompanied by new didactic approaches and assessment tools: new skills must be implemented in order to manage and evaluate such concepts as creativity, participation, as well as cultural mash-up, and new strategies have to be developed to promote learning as a means for socialization of knowledge.

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Bonaiuti, G. (2006). E-learning 2.0. Trento: Erickson.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard: Harvard University Press. (Bruner, J., La mente a piĂš dimensioni. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1993).

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Commissione delle Comunità Europee (2001). Realizzare uno spazio europeo nell’apprendimento permanente, Comunicazione della Commissione, COM 2001 678 inale, Bruxelles, 21/11/2001.

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Ong, W. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Methuen. (Ong, W., Oralità e scrittura. Le tecnologie della parola. Bologna: Il Mulino,1986).

Petrucco, C., & De Rossi, M. (2009). Narrare con il digital storytelling a scuola e nelle organizzazioni. Roma: Carocci.

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Paris: Édition La Découverte. (Salmon, C., Storytelling: La fabbrica delle storie. Roma: Fazi, 2008).

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Editorial Pier Cesare Rivoltella

Media tools and learning processes: Reflections on improving practices Manuela Cantoia

Sud-Est: Technology and guidance Maria Grazia Celentano

Otranto in the Middle Ages Luigi Oliva, Giovanni Alosio e Lucio T. De Paolis

Museums and new educational spaces Paola Oliveri

Learning, teamwork and technologies in the classroom Davide Parmigiani

Social Network Analysis for Moodle: How to evaluate the informal learning and its dynamics in virtual contexts Nicolò Antonio Piave

Implicit theories of teaching in socio-constructivist virtual environments Flavia Santoianni e Claudia Sabatano

Experiential and narrative elements in the learning processes Gabriella Taddeo

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