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How Do People Learn?

Members’ Methods and Communicative Mediation

  • Chapter
Book cover Barriers and Biases in Computer-Mediated Knowledge Communication

Part of the book series: Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Series ((CULS,volume 5))

Abstract

We are concerned with how learning and instruction are accomplished as interactional achievements, that is the practical details of how participants actually go about doing learning and instruction on a moment-to-moment basis. We focus in this chapter on what we term a problematizing move, that is a form of social action that has the effect of calling something previously held to be so into doubt. Drawing conceptually and methodologically on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, we examine problematizing moves in two settings—a problem-based learning (PBL) tutorial meeting conducted face-to-face (F2F) and a distributed PBL (dPBL) meeting mediated through a chat interface. We note that even with the constraints on communication imposed by the mediating technology, the methods employed by members to problematize a problem resemble those seen in F2F meetings. We argue that contrasting members’ methods across settings employing different forms of communicative mediation can be instructive with regard to understanding both the effects of the mediation and the nature of the methods themselves.

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Authors
  1. Timothy Koschmann
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  2. Alan Zemel
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  3. Melinda Conlee-Stevens
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  4. Nata P. Young
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  5. Julie E. Robbs
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  6. Amber Barnhart
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Münster, Germany

    Rainer Bromme

  2. University of Tübingen, Germany

    Friedrich W. Hesse

  3. University of Freiburg, Germany

    Hans Spada

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© 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

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Koschmann, T., Zemel, A., Conlee-Stevens, M., Young, N.P., Robbs, J.E., Barnhart, A. (2005). How Do People Learn?. In: Bromme, R., Hesse, F.W., Spada, H. (eds) Barriers and Biases in Computer-Mediated Knowledge Communication. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Series, vol 5. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-24319-4_12

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