Using concept maps to assess students’ potential for transformative learning with ICT

Socio-cultural learning theories developed over the last 20 years are particularly useful in helping us to understand the reasons for the repeated failure of ICT to transform students’ learning experiences in schools (see Chapter 7). Learning happens most easily when the learner is situated in a context of use (Brown et al. 1989) where s/he is able to learn alongside expert practitioners through a process which Lave and Wenger (1991) call ‘legitimate peripheral participation’. Schools are not ideal learning environments because they necessitate a wide range of extraneous learning that acts as distractions from authentic learning: see for example the body of evidence that Engeström presents to show that diagrams in school textbooks require students to learn that size is notional rather than actual in diagrams; without this knowledge diagrams showing equivalent sizes for the sun and the moon systematically and persistently confused students so that they failed to understand the reasons for the phases of the moon, muddling the concept of ‘phases’ with the concept of eclipse (Engeström 1991). The point here is not that it is unimportant to learn how to interpret diagrams, but that these diagrams were needlessly confusing. The power relations that govern the behaviour of teachers and students in schools, and schools’ own powerlessness in all countries to move outside the structures and practices of education systems, encapsulate them in a time warp. As Papert has come to realise, teachers are not resistant to change but are caught in a constant tension between the technicist demands of the system and their instincts to assist children to learn by engaging actively with ideas and concepts:

The institution of School, with its daily lesson plans, ﬁ xed curriculum, standardized tests, and other such paraphernalia, tends constantly to reduce learning to a series of technical acts and the teacher to the role of a technician. … What is important for thinking about megachange is that this situation places the teacher in a state of tension between two poles: School tries to make the teacher into a technician; in most cases a sense of self resists, though in many the teacher will have internalized School’s concept of teaching.

(Papert 1993, p. 55) ‘Megachange’, as Papert calls it, is what most of us have experienced over the

last ten years in our patterns of living and working practices as a result of ICT. For example, communications, shopping, banking and access to information have been transformed by the arrival of the Internet. Arguably it is only when megachange arrives in schools that the patterns of learning will be transformed for children. Meanwhile, the enormous socio-cultural changes brought about by technology in today’s world have destabilised the way we conceptualise knowledge, teaching, the disciplines and rationality (see Chapter 7):

166 Research methods for ICT in education The circumstances, conditions and the very status of knowledge, learning,

teaching and researching are currently in a state of profound upheaval under the double impact of rapid and far-reaching technological changes and the massive assault on longstanding narratives of foundation and legitimation.

(Lankshear et al. 2000, pp. 17–18)

The difference between information and knowledge has become blurred as Roszak (1986) warned it might and knowledge, according to Lyotard (1979), is commodiﬁ ed as packages to be acquired and exchanged rather than something of value in its own right. Lankshear et al., drawing on Lyotard, describe this as resulting from ‘the impact of technological transformation’ which has undermined long-established practices for legitimating knowledge through concepts such as ‘meaning, truth and emancipation’ (op. cit., p. 22). They point to the impact of the Internet which has resulted in

a ‘superabundance of information’, mainly ‘presented’ uncritically (pp. 26–7), the destabilisation of the ideas of curricula divided into subject disciplines, and the blurring of the underpinning concept that education involves both learning knowledge and learning how that knowledge was produced and justifi ed historically (pp. 34–5). Knowledge in the new age is ‘multimodal’ involving a ‘radical convergence of text, image and sound’ (see also Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), and, in the context of postmodern society, rather than being something that already exists, knowledge becomes transformed into the basis for action: ‘an ability to perform’ (Lankshear et al., op. cit., pp. 35–6). These vast changes in society’s practices of knowledge construction and consumption should be refl ected in changes in assessment practices within education systems. The individualistic notions of individual knowers whose knowledge can be tested within the confi nes of a lone mind, without reference to a community of practice or tools/resources other than pen and paper, belong to the past rather than the present. Yet none of these shifts has touched the practices of schools or the technologies of curriculum and assessment enshrined in our education systems. More fundamentally, and therefore more seriously, schools which have the key role in preparing young people for life have not begun to grapple with the tensions and problems created by these megachanges in how knowledge is defi ned and used in contemporary society (see Chapter 7).

Children, however, spend a signiﬁ cant proportion of their time outside school. They are used to leading multiple lives at school, at home and beyond, straddling the cultures of youth, family and school. They inhabit different activity systems and use a variety of ICT tools, which are an integral part of many of their lives, and have

a signiﬁ cant mediating impact in the home. Much research has been carried out in the last ten years into children’ use of ICT in the home (Downes 1996, 1999; Sanger et al. 1997; Livingstone and Bovill 1999; Furlong et al. 2000; Sutherland et al. 2001; Somekh et al. 2002a). These studies show children using technology for a variety of purposes, nearly always rather autonomously, often several times a week and sometimes for long periods of uninterrupted use. ImpaCT2 was to provide substantial further evidence of the variety of ways in which young people use ICT at home, ﬁ nding also that the time spent using ICT at home for the average 10–11 year

Mapping learning potential 167 old is around three times, and for 12–16 year olds around four times, that spent at

school (Somekh et al. 2002c, p. 6).

Using concept maps to assess students’ potential for transformative learning with ICT