Cognitive Ethnography of In Vivo Students' Technology Enhanced Learning

Learning is a practical engagement with other persons and artefacts in fields of practical activity rather than changes in the ‘inner’ mind. The focus in understanding how learning takes place needs to be on how persons participate in the everyday practices of the field. Learners learn by moving around in, literally and figuratively, the learning domain, both spatially and temporally. We need to develop a science of learning that focuses on how concrete persons know and learn while participating in activities and practices required by society. To do this, we need a distinct cognitive ethnography that follows students through the activities, places and situations in which learning takes place. The kinds of changes that underpin learning depend on what learners are oriented to, what they do, and what values they are seeking to realise rather than on purported ‘inner’ mental mechanisms. Using video recording, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and Multimodal Event Analysis (Thibault & King, 2015), we seek to follow students along their learning trajectories and their participation in learning activities in order to observe and document qualitative changes, the markers of learning in specific episodes, how relevant experiences in and out of University reconfigure student learning, how cumulative-quantitative changes lead to transformative-qualitive changes, and which resources and environments help to bring about these changes. The talk will discuss some concrete examples in relation to the issues referred to above.