The work-reflection-learning cycle - Department of Computer and ...

The work-reflection-learning cycle in SE student projects: Use of collaboration tools
Knowledge-based learning communities “often share many of the features of a
community of practice but focus on the deliberate and formal production of
external knowledge about the practice”. This includes being committed to
recording and sharing knowledge “outside its immediate use or active context”
(Riel and Polin 2004, p.21).
In SE student projects and project based learning more generally, while knowledge
building beyond the project itself may be important in some projects, the teams are
typical task-based learning communities. This theoretical point is central to the
perspective on the use of lightweight tools in research paper P4. At the same time in
project based learning, participation in authentic work (e.g the CoP of the professional
community or possibly a particular organization) is a motivating force. Issues arising
from SE project students simultaneously being members of different types of learning
communities are discussed in P1.
2.1.3 Distributed cognition
From a constructionist perspective, learning in a SE student team can be viewed in
terms of knowledge construction. To understand how knowledge is constructed (e.g. by
the aid of technology) it is useful to go into more detail on the role of tools and how
knowledge is distributed.
The impact on activity (e.g. project work) of tools is captured in the idea of mediation:
the use of tools forming the activity and the activity over time forming the design of the
tools. This is a key point in various theoretical frameworks explaining the interplay of
the individual and the social (e.g. activity theory (Engeström 1987; Leont'ev 1981;
Vygotsky 1978) and actor network theory (Latour 2005)). Tools can be understood in a
broad sense, comprising physical artifacts, theories and concepts as well as
computerized tools. Within the framework of distributed cognition (DCog) (Hutchins
1995), the central unit of analysis is the functional system, “a collection of individuals
and artifacts and their relations to each other in a particular work practice” (Rogers and
Ellis 1994). As in actor network theory, the artifacts (e.g. tools) are considered entities
analytically on a par with human actors, which helps shed light on the dynamics of tool
mediation. Analyzing a case of collaborative work from the perspective of DCog, the
main goal is to account for how the distributed structures are coordinated. This implies
examining the contributions of the environment in which the work activity takes place,
individuals‟ interactions and the use of artifacts in interaction, and the representational
media used. DCog has a focus on the way knowledge is propagated across different
representational states along various communicative pathways (Rogers and Ellis 1994).
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