Unlimited Access to Information
The WEB provides learners and teachers with access to an amount of information that has never been accessible before and is developing at an exponential rate. This statement is so trivial that many people only point out the negative aspects:
• The quality of information is uneven, there is often no validity check.
• There is an overflow of information, it is difficult to find what we are looking for.
• The information is not filtered. Hence students may encounter pages which contradict the teachers moral or ethical values.
• The information is not structured, the Web is a huge unorganised file repertory.
• There is a lack of meta-information (who produced this information, is this author a
reliable source, how long will this information remain valid, ....)
All these critiques are valid. However, they should not hide the fact that this access to information still is a new opportunity, and as such, worth to be explored. Not only students have access to more information, but, more importantly, to a larger variety of information sources. Once again, this feature does not per se guarantee any effectiveness. Our point is that it is an affordance that clearly discriminates Web-based environments from previous systems. The effectiveness depends upon the way the designer exploits this opportunity, which raises two questions:
• How does the designer address the problems listed above? Concerning the issues of quality control and difficulty to find information, there are two strategies: either to pre-select information, i.e. to set up a page gathering the information considered as correct, relevant for the course, morally acceptable etc., or to provide unfiltered access to the Web but to teach students how to search for information on the Web, to train them to be critical, ...
• What role does the designer allocate to information access in the learning process? There is a risk that designers confuse setting up a learning environment and providing access to information. As a caricature, a teacher could say “Everything you need to know on this subject is on the Web, please read it and be back for the exam in 6 months.” The risk of ‘simple knowledge transmission’ is quite high if one looks at University Web sites, but it is not present at primary school level.
Collaborative Learning is not a Recipe
Virtual learning environments contain obvious affordances for collaborative learning. We hear many over-expectations regarding the benefits of collaborative learning, and overexpectations always have a counter effect. Is collaborative learning more effective than learning alone? Comparative experiments gave an advantage to collaborative learning in about two third of the studies. This led to a second generation of studies which aimed to determine under which conditions collaborative learning is effective: which group size (2, 3, 5, more ...), which group composition (homogenous/heterogeneous, mixed gender or not, which task, which communication media, and so forth. These factors interact with each ,(.... other in way that it is impossible to control all conditions and to guarantee effective collaboration. Hence, the third generation of empirical studies analyse which interactions do indeed take place during collaborative learning. Simply stated, collaborative learning is effective if the group members engage in rich interactions: When they explain themselves in terms of conceptions and not simply answers, when they argue about the meaning of terms and representations, when they shift roles, ... One cannot a priori guarantee that rich interactions occur, but one can regulate the collaborative process to favour the emergence of these types of interactions. This can be performed in two ways:
• Structuring collaboration: The teacher does not simply ask the group members to do some task together, but specifies a scenario. A scenario includes several phases and, at each phase, the team has to produce something and the team members have some role to play. Roles such as criticising the partner’s proposal, summarizing what the partner has read, probing the partner for justifications, ... are expected to
trigger productive interactions.
Regulating interactions: Even if the efforts to structure collaboration increase the probability that productive interactions would occur, there is no guarantee that the interactions do actually occur. Therefore, collaborative learning would benefit from some external regulation, generally a tutor. The role of this tutor is not to intervene at the task level, but to make sure that all group members participate, to point out contradictions between group members which have not been noticed and so forth.Regulation is however difficult when interactions occur in the virtual space, a teacher cannot for instance regulate synchronous communication in 10 teams of 3 students. Researchers are now developing tools to help teachers to regulate groups and/or to help groups to regulate themselves.
