Flexible Learning and the Architecture of Learning Places

21 Flexible Learning and the Architecture of Learning Places Peter Goodyear CoCo Research Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

CONTENTS Introduction .....................................................................................................................................................................252 Flexible Learning ............................................................................................................................................................252 Flexible Use of Time and Space ...........................................................................................................................253 Flexibility over Goals, Methods, and Assessment................................................................................................253 Weak and Strong Interpretations of Situatedness...........................................................................................................254 The Ergonomics of Learning Environments...................................................................................................................254 Being a Learner: Putting Learning in Its Place..............................................................................................................254 Further Research .............................................................................................................................................................255 Concluding Remarks .......................................................................................................................................................255 References .......................................................................................................................................................................255

ABSTRACT The point of departure for this chapter is the idea that learning activity is becoming less constrained by time, space, and the organizational requirements of educational providers. As people take more control over their learning activity, there is a multiplication of the possible influences of time and space on their learning. If learning can take place anywhere, then we need to know more about the pedagogical affordances of the various wheres in which it is situated. This becomes a priority for the effective learner—needing to know how to select and configure appropriate learnplaces—as well as for researchers trying to understand the sometimes subtle connections between place and learning. The chapter offers a summary description of

flexible learning and then moves on to consider the relations between learning and place. The account is structured, in part, by a distinction between weaker and stronger interpretations of what is meant by situated learning. The function of the weaker interpretation is to highlight the importance of the learning context, such that we can focus on the affordances of the learnplace and consider the ergonomics of supportive learning environments. The stronger interpretation of situated learning causes us to take seriously the idea that being a learner is first and foremost engagement in a cultural practice, that people have to learn to engage in such cultural practices, and that place has a distinctive role in cultural practice. Paradoxically, ideas about flexible learning and mobile learning help us put learning in its place. 251

Peter Goodyear

KEYWORDS Ergonomics of learning environments: The applied science that helps illuminate the relationships between a learner and a learnplace. Flexible learning: Learning that is relatively free of logistical and educational constraints. Learning places (or learnplaces): The immediate physical setting for someone’s learning activity, including the tools and artifacts, digital and material, that come to hand. Situated learning: A perspective on learning that emphasizes its social and physical context.

INTRODUCTION Categorizations of instructional approaches and of the experience of learning are rarely symmetrical. A worldview that makes perfect sense to the teacher or instructional systems designer may well prove unrecognizable to the learner. This issue is particularly thorny when we talk about flexible learning, distance education, or blended learning. Who bends what in flexible learning? Where is the distance in distance education? What gets blended in blended learning? This chapter is aimed at doing two things. At a substantive level, it introduces some key ideas and literature about flexible learning, the situated nature of learning, and the relations between learning and learnplaces. At a meta-level, the chapter tracks and combines some arguments for a richer conception of what is involved in being a learner. This is not an area with a rich base of empirical literature (Van Note Chism, 2002); consequently, many of the references are intended to help the reader explore better ways of conceptualizing the field. Some suggestions for promising lines of research can be found at the end of the chapter. The term learnplace is used interchangeably with learning place in this chapter, depending on the flow of the text. The two mean the same. Learnplace, by analogy with workplace, is a place at which serious learning is done. Ford and colleagues (1996) and Slack and colleagues (1996) provided the earliest recorded usages of the term. Place is used deliberately as a way of indicating something more specific and concrete than space—something imbued with meaning and value (Auburn and Barnes, 2006; Jamieson et al., 2000; Sime, 1986). Flexible learning connotes those learning situations in which the learner has substantial control over the logistics of learning, notably the location and timing of the learner’s learning activity. It can also connote 252

situations in which learners have substantial control over what they set out to learn, how they go about learning it, and how their learning is assessed. In short, flexible learning involves the loosening of logistical or educational constraints (Boot and Hodgson, 1987). The focus on learning places reflects a growing acknowledgment of the importance of the physical environment in influencing how people learn and what they learn (Bliss et al., 1999; Poysa et al., 2005; Singleton, 1998). This is, in part, connected with trends toward more flexible arrangements for learning (Jamieson et al., 2000; Monahan, 2002). If one conceives of learning as that which takes place in a timedelimited lesson in a teacher’s classroom, then the relations between learning and place seem bounded and obvious—part of what we take for granted in educational practice even though the physical layout of a classroom may impose strong constraints on pedagogy (Comber and Wall, 2001; Graetz and Goliber, 2002; Van Note Chism, 2002). Shifts toward anytime, anywhere, anyhow learning can be accompanied by two competing views about place: that place becomes irrelevant (the mobile fantasy) or that the qualities of place must be understood in a more nuanced way. The second main section of the chapter examines this through a consideration of ideas in the literature about weaker and stronger interpretations of what it means for learning to be situated. The implications of these two interpretations are drawn out in the third and fourth sections, which focus on physical contexts for learning and learning conceived as participation in cultural practice, where the culture provides physical and digital resources that influence the very nature of learning activity.

FLEXIBLE LEARNING …space and time are not just material constraints to be overcome or resources to be used; rather, they have different qualities depending on the historically specific discourse through which they are understood. Thus, new interpretive frames by which space and time are understood are integral to the creation of institutions which achieve new forms of control over the spacing and timing of human activity. (Friedland and Boden, 1994, p. 29)

The literature on flexible learning is of two kinds. One kind is essentially functional. In broad terms, it takes flexibility for granted as a good thing and aims to provide practical knowledge and advice about how to promote and support more flexible forms of learning activity (de Boer and Collis, 2005; Khan, 2006; Lockwood and Latchem, 1997; Mason, 1994; Van den

Flexible Learning and the Architecture of Learning Places Brande, 1993; Wade et al., 1994). The other kind takes a more critical perspective. Much of it has the goal of demonstrating that intended benefits are not always achieved or that the liberationist discourse of flexibility conceals some hidden or unanticipated costs to students (Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Clark, 2002; Paechter et al., 2001; Willems, 2005). Both perspectives are necessary. Indeed, some of the practical guidance provided in the literature would be more useful if it took a less romantic or naïve view of the charms of flexibility. Lieve Van den Brande’s (1993, p. 2) definition of flexible learning still serves us well: “Flexible learning is enabling learners to learn when they want (frequency, timing, duration), how they want (modes of learning), and what they want (that is, learners can define what constitutes learning to them).”

Flexible Use of Time and Space Temporal flexibility implies that learning is scheduled at times to suit the learner. This might include control over the deadline for achieving a learning objective, the duration and frequency of learning activities, and so on. At a macro-level (time spans measured in years), temporal flexibility includes such considerations as lifelong learning (i.e., that learning is not just restricted to the years of formal schooling). It refers to the freedom to learn when the need arises in the course of one’s life, not just at the stages predetermined for the convenience of educational providers. Meso-level temporal flexibility operates on time spans of weeks and months. The ability to start a course of study at any time in the year, rather than (say) just at the beginning of a semester, would be an example of meso-level flexibility. Micro-level flexibility operates on a time scale of days down to seconds. Flexibility on this scale allows the learner detailed control over the scheduling and pace of their learning activity, allowing them, for example, to “harvest fragments of time” for learning in an otherwise hectic schedule (Roberts et al., 2003). The spatial dimension of flexible learning refers to learning that takes place at locations that suit the learner. Flexible learning should minimize the disruption to the learner’s other activities (at work, at home, etc.). Learning that involves the learner’s absence from work or home may have the advantage of allowing the learner to concentrate fully on their learning activity, but it can also disadvantage those who are tied to the home or workplace and can be expensive for both the learner and their employer. Equally, enabling learners to study from their workplaces can help contextualize learning and dissolve unhelpful boundaries between work and learning (Goodyear, 2006; Van den Brande, 1993).

Flexibility over Goals, Methods, and Assessment Flexibility over learning goals means that learning activity can have its roots in the needs and interests of the learner and emerge from (or be inseparable from) their ongoing work and life. Much conventional learning activity is strongly shaped by the existence and nature of assessment systems or by the goals of teachers and educational institutions. Flexible learning may be relatively free from such influences. The learner should take a lead in defining what it is they need to know. They may be helped in this by a teacher (or by other learners) who may have knowledge about good ways of refining and reaching the learner’s objectives. Definition of needs can occur at a number of levels; the learner may define a high-level need and pass over to a teacher the lower level decisions about how this need can be met. Conversely, the higher level decisions may be made by a teacher or a competence-certifying institution, while control over the details of what is learned stays with the learner. In a flexible learning regime, learners should exert a high level of control over how they study: whether reading texts or listening to lectures or through practical work. There is a strong impetus to recognize the learner’s need for autonomy, but this is not to say that the unsupported learner is always able to make good decisions about their learning or that they should be dissuaded from asking for advice. Flexible learning should make learning opportunities available to all those who wish to take advantage of them. This means doing away with entry qualifications. Less strongly, it means removing barriers that have no clearly demonstrable causal link with the learner’s benefiting from the learning experience. Use of self-study materials, such as books, articles, audio and video tapes, computer programs, and so on, is frequently associated with flexible learning. This is largely a byproduct of the economics and social organization of education—few people can afford ondemand access to teachers and other subject-matter experts. Nevertheless, there is no principled reason why flexible learning should involve the use of selfstudy materials. Flexible learning is also often thought of as a solitary activity. In so far as this is true, it is a byproduct of distance-taught correspondence courses, models for flexible learning, and the costs (financial and other) of communication between dispersed learners. Flexible learning need not be a solitary activity. It often is so, because of the methods that institutions have adopted for supporting flexible learning or because the learner is learning without reference to an institution. A tension 253

Peter Goodyear also exists between individual flexibility and the circumstances most conducive to collaborative learning. Where individual learners choose to have a high level of control over the timing of their study, for example, it can be very difficult for them to engage in collaborative activities such as seminars (which may benefit from participants being at a common point in their learning). Resolving this tension between individual and group interests can be a difficult challenge.

WEAK AND STRONG INTERPRETATIONS OF SITUATEDNESS We now need to turn to place. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger are to be credited for reminding us that learning is socially and physically situated (Lave, 1988; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Rogoff and Lave, 1984), although a number of other authors must also be acknowledged in considering the renaissance of this idea, such as Hutchins (1995), Scribner (1985), and Suchman (1987). The force of situatedness varies somewhat in different accounts, but Engestrom (1999) neatly arranges these into weaker and stronger interpretations. The weak version asserts that learning is situated in physical and social contexts so context must be taken into account when one studies learning. For examples of this position, see Greeno (1989) or Barab and Plucker (2002). The strong interpretation—exemplified in Lave and Wenger’s work—is that learning is a byproduct of participation in a social practice, that such social practices do not have to be explicitly defined as practices of learning, and that one should focus on the practice rather than the context. Thinking about weak and strong interpretations of physical situatedness helps us partition the relevant literature on learning places. The weak (contextual) interpretation invokes notions of ergonomics and affordance. The stronger (social practice) interpretation raises deeper questions about being and becoming a learner and the role of place in knowledge practices. These two subthemes are reviewed in the next two sections.

THE ERGONOMICS OF LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS The work of John Sweller (this volume), Richard Mayer (2001), and others on the implications of cognitive load theory for learning from multimedia is a useful starting point for thinking about the design of resources that support efficient learning. This body of work represents the micro-level pole of a continuum for which the 254

macro-level pole is the global environment within which a learner’s activity is situated. A focus on learnplaces suggests the meso-level, but one must acknowledge straight away that learnplaces are constituted by artifacts of the micro-level and situated within influential, spatially more extensive contexts. The ways in which artifacts and tools (objects at the micro-level) exert influence upon learning is commonly conceptualized using notions of affordance. This construct originated in the ecological psychology of Gibson (1977) and was transplanted to educational technology via human–computer interaction (Norman, 1990, 1999), suffering some sleight of hand; it is now widely used to connote processes of influence rather than causation—as when one implies that the features of a tool or other artifact suggest one usage, or one course of action, rather than another (see Chapter 22 in this volume). At the meso-level, where we can deal appropriately with the qualities of a learnplace, it may be more productive to focus on ergonomics rather than the logic of affordance. The case for an ergonomics of learning environments can be found in Goodyear (1997, 2000). The essence of this perspective is that the design of educational technologies is best informed by an understanding of the actuality of learners’ work. One reason why educational technologies are ignored by learners is that they do not fit with the learners’ actual work. They reflect teachers’ views of the prescribed tasks rather than learners’ real-world activity. An understanding of learnplace qualities can then be conceived as a kind of cognitive anthropology of situated learning.

BEING A LEARNER: PUTTING LEARNING IN ITS PLACE Flexible use of space (mobile learning) means that place cannot be used to delimit the social practices of learning: If one can learn anywhere, what does it mean to be a learner? Probing at this question reveals some interesting answers—not least, that most of the social practices we associate with learning are subtly influenced by place. As an example, take the work of Charles Crook and Paul Light on campus-based students’ engagement in learning with information and communication technology (ICT) (Crook, 2002; Crook and Barrowcliff, 2001; Crook and Light, 1999, 2002). This program of research looked at differences and similarities in the study practices of undergraduate students from the same university, half of whom had computers with high-speed network connections in their study bedrooms and half of whom did not. Similarities in the study practices of the two groups help us identify some of the subtle influences of the material

Flexible Learning and the Architecture of Learning Places world and of the patterns of interaction and communication lodged in that material world (Crook and Light, 2002, p. 174): Deliberate learning involves engaging with exposition, orchestrated discussion, research, systematic annotation, the focused reading of text, and a variety of other directed activities that many students may not always find easy to mobilize and manage independently. Sites of formal education have evolved structures that sustain and coordinate such activities with a scaffold of cultural resources: timetables, curricula, designed spaces, discourse rituals and so on … making progress within this infrastructure amounts to a process of enculturation. Students are confronted with the various arenas of study as formalized versions of activities well rehearsed in their informal lives.

A good example is private study. An expectation of higher education is that engagement in private study will be focused and sustained. It is easy to miss the way in which the achievement of such study depends on the design and cultivation of various institutional spaces and practices (such as study bedrooms and quiet library spaces). ICT can break down some of the helpful insulation between the protecting spaces and orderly practices conducive to difficult study and the personal spaces and informal practices familiar from everyday life (Crook and Light, 2002). Place matters in other ways. Places are home to artifacts, to a greater or lesser degree. From a sociocultural perspective, artifacts are embodiments of ideas, concepts, and methods. They are the “manufactured objects that silently impregnate the furniture of the world with human intelligence” (White, 1996, p. xiii). Not just books and computers but also rulers, watches, notepads, and Post-it notes enable some forms of knowledge work by “being to hand.” The ability to offload memory to artifacts in the learnplace is a strong influence on what is cognitively possible, as well as a skill to be mastered (Perkins, 1993). To assert that one’s PDA can do all these things is to trample roughshod over the subtle qualities of the learnplace (Crook and Barrowcliff, 2001).

include study practices associated with new mobile technologies and ubiquitous intelligence (Benford, 2005; Sharples, 2000). Second, we need ways to capture, formalize, and share knowledge about recurring patterns in the physically situated activities associated with study and learning, such that we can help designers, teachers, and learners develop a better practical understanding of how to improve learnplaces. The people most closely involved in such matters do not have shared language or constructs to deal with phenomena that are of central importance to them, such as learning, study, the ergonomics and affordances of physical space, and digital tools. One promising line of work here is represented by a resurgence of interest in the analytic methods and writing of the architect Christopher Alexander on design patterns and pattern languages (see, for example, Alexander et al., 1977; Frizell and Hubscher, 2002; Goodyear, 2005). Third, we need to understand students’ experiences of learning in situations where they are taking greater control over the time and location of their learning activity. Phenomenographical research methods are highly appropriate here (Marton, 1981; Prosser and Trigwell, 1999), as this research tradition has probably given us deeper insights into the nature and variation in students’ experiences of learning than any comparable approach. Phenomenographic research is, however, remarkably quiet about the effects of place on student experience.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Technological change allows a shift in the expectations, practices and discourse around the location of activity in time and space. Although flexible learning, mobile learning, and their analogs are sometimes held to have conquered time and space, paradoxically they render time and space more important. This chapter has provided an entry point into some of the ideas and literature connecting learning to place and has suggested some points of departure for new research. REFERENCES

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