For a long time, technology has been used as a support in education, e.g., radio, TV, and tape recorder. The goal has differed – to ease teachers’ work, to give learners a more stimulating learning environment, to adapt the school situation to normal work situations, or to bridge the gap between school and home.

Lately, the concept of flexible learning is used, especially concerning adult learners (Fåhræus, 2000). Young learners might not be enough motivated or self-guided to manage studies at a distance, it has been said (Holmberg, 1998). But if distance education could be used, schools would be able to offer a greater variety of courses, also at small and rural schools.

The Swedish government has initiated a project at the Swedish School Board with the goal to find out if and how distance education could be used in upper-secondary schools (ages 15-18) (SFS, 2000). Will these learners be mature enough to handle this new situation? Does the technology at hand work as an effective tool to bridge the distance? And how do the learners perceive their communication with the teacher?

GOALS

The goals of this study are:

• To illuminate how learners appropriate and master the technology used at distance education, and
• To describe implications of this for learners, teachers, and teaching organisations, as well as for systems developers.

A mainly qualitative approach has been applied. Two courses at Swedish upper-secondary schools have been studied in detail. Special emphasis has been put on the integrity of learners and teachers and on the ethical issues.

During the whole process, I have had close contact with both the teachers and the learners, observing their work and studies, making interviews and receiving short written comments from the students. Electronic communication has been saved for later analysis.

There are, however, not many schools in Sweden practising distance education. To give a broader perspective, I will, therefore, also study similar cases in Australia, where distance education has been used in schools for a long time.

THEORETICAL APPROACH

My pedagogic thinking is based on the sociocultural perspective with roots in Dewey and Vygotsky (Säljö, 2000). Vygotsky and Dewey focus their theories on children who learn while participating with others in sociocultural activities. Rogoff (1995) uses three different planes of focus in sociocultural activity – community/institutional, interpersonal, and personal. She points out that these planes of focus are not separable but "involving different grains of focus with the whole sociocultural activity. To understand each requires the involvement of the others." (p. 141). In discussing the learning going on in these planes Rogoff uses three concepts: apprenticeship, guided participation, and participatory appropriation. Her approach seems to be fruitful also for my study.

Activity theory can be used as a framework to study the relationships between the learner and the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) tools, the peer learners and the whole environment. It takes into account the context, the social interaction between humans, and the continuous development when an interactive computer system is used. It focuses on the role of tools and it regards the user as a person with its own will, acting deliberately with clear objects in mind. "Activity theory, with its emphasis on importance of motive and consciousness - which belong only to humans - sees people and things as fundamentally different. People are not reduced to 'nodes' or 'agents' in a system; 'information processing' is not seen as something to be modelled in the same way for people and machines. In activity theory artefacts are mediators of human thought and behaviour; they do not occupy the same ontological space." (Nardi, 1996, p 13)

THE OBJECT OF STUDY

Two different courses where studied in detail, one was about computer databases and the other about digitalized music. The courses are given during the spring term 2002 and are not completed yet (May 2002). In both cases, all learners were meeting in one place with video communication with the teacher, sitting in a remote place. The teacher visited the learners once in the beginning of each course. In the case of the music course, the face-to-face meeting lasted during two and a half-day and included practice on digital keyboards. After this first meeting, the seven learners and the teacher met only a few times over video, and they had sporadic e-mail communication. The learners are supposed to send in their productions to an electronic learning platform, and to comment on each others products. But when this is written (May 2002) only one of the groups have done that. In the case of the database course, the first face-to-face meeting lasted for one workday. After that, the fourteen learners and the teacher have met once or twice a week via video. The teacher will visit the learners one more time, at the end of the course.

RESULTS

Through observations during meetings and interviews I have collected material, which gives us some insight into how the learners perceive their situation as distant students. I will present the material here, using activity theory as a structure and the three planes of focus presented by Rogoff (1995) as levels of analysis.

Activity theory as a structure for analysis

Activity theory is a framework for studying development processes. It is cross-disciplinary and takes into account both individual and social levels of the process. The basic unit of analysis is the activity. An activity is something we are doing directed to an object. What motivates us to do this is that the object can be transformed to an outcome. The object can be both material and abstract, e.g., a thing, a plan, or an idea. The reason to choose the activity as the basic unit of analysis is that the activity, defined in this way, includes the context for human action. Most actions take place in a context and within a community, which ought to be included in the analysis. (Kuutti, 1996)

How we act as human beings is strongly influenced by the instruments or artefacts that we use. The artefacts could be physical instruments, like computers or video devices, or more abstract phenomena like methods or rules. These artefacts mediate cultural symbolic systems, which guide us in our activities. The structure of human activity (see Picture 1) is a model derived from activity theory and it can be of help when we want to understand the interplay between students and teacher, their goals and instruments. (Engeström, 1987)

Subjects

In this study the learner is the subject. There are a total of 20 learners taking part in the studied courses, 13 in the database course and 7 in the music course. All but one are boys. Four of the database learners refused to be part of the research activities, which means that I have not interviewed them. The learners are taking their last year before graduation. Two of them study on an Interactive-media programme, and the rest on computer programmes.

I will illustrate my presentation with citations from the interviews, translated by myself from Swedish. In order to keep the learners’ integrity, I will use codes instead of names. Each learner is given a letter (A, B, C etc.) followed by d for the database course and m for the music course. My questions are indicated by a Q.

All learners are well aquatinted with computers and communicate frequently through synchronous media like IRC (Inter-relayed chat). They seem less used to asynchronous channels like conferencing and forum systems.

For a group to collaborate, a common motive is essential. The participants have to make an effort to reach a shared meaning (Schwartz, 1999). If members of a group strive towards different goals there is a big risk for problems to arise. Most of the learners in this study aim at passing the course as easily as possible, some of them trying to get a higher degree, though. Only a few of them mention that they value the knowledge as such or that they value a new experience.

Instruments or Artefacts

Both courses use video conferencing to bridge the distance between the teacher and the learners. As a complement, they use e-mail and, in the music course, a learning platform. The learners got tasks to complete on their own or in small groups and were supposed to send their solutions to the teacher at certain deadlines. While they were working, they now and then run into problems. This caused them to apply different strategies: Normally they first asked a peer student about help. If this was not successful, they either wrote an e-mail or waited until the next video session. They found it very difficult to explain the problem for the teacher in words, and, even if they managed, they sometimes had problems to interpret the answer.

Later in the course, the teacher started the session by presenting some new material and giving the learners a task to complete. After that, the learners went to the computers and worked with their tasks while the teacher was still there in the video. After some time, the teacher asked one of the learners to explain how he had solved the task and why. This arrangement changed the communication situation completely: The learners were much more active and put more questions to the teacher.

During the last part of the course, the learners will be working on a project task in groups of three. Now, they meet with the teacher via video, just to put questions and discuss problems with the task.

I asked the learners if they could identify any changes in how the video sessions were arranged, but most of them could not think of such changes. Some of them did, however, describe the above-mentioned change.

These learners knew each other well after three years study at the same two schools—group-wise. They were used to working together in small groups, and they also belonged to coteries or gangs, in some cases depending on national descent. The distance courses forced the learners to collaborate and this had a slightly positive effect on the collaboration, also in other circumstances.

The communication was guided by unwritten laws, which developed during the courses. At the beginning, learners were rather stiff in front of the video screen and camera. My interpretation is that they were influenced by a TV metaphor. The technology mediated a culture or an accepted behaviour: You do not put questions to a TV set, you just watch and listen. Even if the teacher asked them to respond, not much was said during the first sessions.

All learners stress the fact that distance learning requires more independent studies. Some of them consider this as an advantage, others as a disadvantage or at least as a problem to overcome. This has also affected their learning.

There had been vigorous development during these courses, both within and between persons (Rogoff, 1995). At the institutional level, there were hopeful signs of potential development.

At the personal level the learners improved their problem-solving. They developed various strategies for using the technology to manage problem situations. At the same time, they developed their collaborative and social skills. They also got training in working independently and taking initiatives furthering their learning. They found that e-mail is a too slow and narrow medium when asking for help from the teacher. So they started by asking peer learners. If this did not help, they e-mailed the teacher, so he could discuss the problem during the next video session. Over the video, they could explain their problems and the teacher could show them how to solve them. But this procedure required that the teacher prolong the video sessions to give enough time for learners to work with their tasks and reach situations where help is needed.

As one learner pointed out, the tasks were so difficult that none of them could manage alone. In the absence of the teacher, the learners more or less had to collaborate, thus developing their skills in helping and asking for help. Some of the learners meant that this had positive implications, also on their studies in other subjects where distance education was not applied. Most learners found it challenging to have to study independently. They noticed that they did not study very industriously the first weeks, but as the course went on, they realised the need to start working on the subject. Some pointed out that they ought to have learnt this earlier, in previous classes. They had been used to having a teacher telling them what to do and how. Not until now were they provoked to take initiatives.

At the inter-personal level, we noticed that collaboration developed in small groups and between learners and teacher, as well as between learners and the local tutor. The learners noticed the importance of this collaboration and they also took steps to make it work better.

At the institutional level, the studied courses had formed one component in a project for expanding the use of distance education in upper-secondary schools. One of the studied schools had had some experience of distance education before. For both schools, there definitely were valuable contributions for further steps.

REFERENCES

Dillenbourg, P. (Ed.). (1999). Collaborative learning: Cognitive and computational approaches. Oxford, UK: Pergamon/Elsevier Science.

Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding. An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Jyväskylä: Painettu Gummerus.

Fåhræus, E. R. (2000). Growing knowledge - How to support collaborative learning e-discussions in forum systems. Stockholm University/KTH, Stockholm.

Holmberg, C. (1998). På distans. Utbildning, undervisning och lärande. (At a distance. Education, instruction and learning.) SOU 1998:83. Stockholm: Utbildningsdepartementet.

Kuutti, K. (1996). Activity theory as a potential framework for Human-Computer Interaction research. In Nardi, B. A. (ed), Context and consciousness: Activity theory.

Nardi, B. A. (ed.) (1996). Context and consciousness: Activity theory and Human-Computer Interaction. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nardi, B. A. (1996). Activity theory and Human-Computer Interaction. In Nardi, B. A. (ed.). Context and consciousness: Activity theory and Human-Computer Interaction. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rogoff, B. (1995). Observing sociocultural activity on three planes: Participatory appropriation, guided participation, and apprenticeship. In Wertsch, J. V., del Río, P. & Alvarez, A. (1995). Sociocultural studies of mind. Cambridge University Press.

Schwartz, D. L. (1999). The productive agency that drives collaborative learning. In P. Dillenbourg (Ed.), Collaborative learning: Cognitive and computational approaches (pp. 198-218). Oxford, UK: Pergamon/Elsevier Science.

SFS 2000:158 (2000). Förordning om försöksverksamhet med distansundervisning i gymnasieskolan (Regulation about experiment on distance education in upper-secondary schools). Stockholm: Skolverket.

Säljö, R. (2000). Lärande i praktiken – ett sociokulturellt perspektiv (Learning in practice – a sociocultural perspective). Stockholm: Prisma.