Anais do IHC'2001 - Departamento de Informática e Estatística - UFSC

Anais do IHC’2001 - IV Workshop sobre Fatores Humanos em Sistemas Computacionais 235
(and tangible) occurrences of concepts is what characterizes the ability to participate in
discourse.
We will not engage in further considerations about the parallel between such semiotic
characterization of sign-mastering progression, on the one hand, and learning, on the other.
Our goal is only to discuss HCI design issues raised by previous research on DM and
learnware. However, an interesting example (among many others) of the connections
between Semiotics and Cognitive Psychology is Piaget’s genetic epistemology [Piaget,
1970]. A parallel between Peirce’s phenomenological categories and Piaget’s levels of
cognitive evolution can be easily drawn. Moreover, Lakoff’s extensive account of
philosophical, psychological and linguistic research that supports his views about the
pervasive role of phenomenologically-rooted metaphors in human discourse [Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987] provides additional evidence of how the linguistic rendition
of abstract concepts is grounded in relations and perceptions that we could characterize as
cases of secondness and firstness in human experience.
Thus, our semiotic account of the findings reported in experiments carried out with Super
Tangrams ©
allows us to propose that:
• DOM is not an appropriate interface style for learnware if the objects being
manipulated are not sufficient to represent the necessary denotations involved in
linguistic formulations of the principles to be learned.
In other words, if we expect learners using DOM to formulate principles such as
“when crossing parents with pure contrasting heredity traits, the next generation of
individuals will exhibit the characteristic of only one of the contrasting traits”, we
should provide them with visual signs (static or dynamic) that can stand for such
notions as ‘crossing’, ‘parent’, ‘heredity trait’, ‘pure’, ‘contrasting’, ‘next
generation individuals’, ‘characteristic’, ‘only one’, and ‘exhibit’. Note that the
visual code is made up of visual representations and manipulations of these.
• The evolution from manipulation experiences to linguistic formulations leads us to
integrate DCM and RDCM into a two-stage single interactive style. This new style
may be more appropriate for learnware if (a) the concepts being manipulated are
sufficient to represent the necessary denotations involved in linguistic formulations
of the principles to be learned, and (b) the constructive path leading from
secondness to thirdness of signs used to represent the concepts involved in learning
can be traced with intermediary visual signs that are progressively less indexical
and more symbolic.
If there are no intermediary signs, leading from indices to symbols, in the
representations used by the interface designer, an important step in constructive
learning may be missing. The ST experiments showed that the three levels of
progressive fading in RDCM played an important role in leading children to master
the geometric concepts underlying translation, rotation and reflection of polygons.
If, for example, in the domain of Mendelian heredity laws, there is not a
representational scaffolding that will help learners generalize from concrete
crossings to abstract systematic principles, this step will fall outside the scope of the
specific learnware tools. Learners may eventually reach the generalization stage,
but the progression will not be modeled in the system as a path. It will be a discrete