P2PU | Introduction to the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

Understanding misunderstandings

I'm reviewing this short article called "Communicability evaluation" (content also available as HTML here). It focuses on communication through artifacts, but I think many of the ideas could be applied to regular old communication (which increasingly uses text artifacts anyway).

The text discusses the following tags: (1) Where is it? (2) What now? (2) What’s this? (3) Oops! (4) Where am I? (5) I can’t do it this way. (6) Why doesn't it? (7) What happened? (8) Looks fine to me. (9) I give up. (10) I can do otherwise. (11) Thanks but no thanks. -- and, (12) Help!

The sheer quantity of these tags indicates that "misunderstandings" are diverse and likely very prevalant - otherwise we probably wouldn't have so many words - and so many different ways to talk about them.

There are several references included in the short article, the most central being The semiotic engineering of human-computer interaction. The ideas seem useful for learning design (whether or not computer mediated).

Task Discussion

Joe Corneli May 28, 2011, 8:23 a.m.

I think the catalog of misunderstandings would go nicely with the questions by Dan Suthers (overview page) that Stian highlighted in a recent blog post, namely:

What activities does a given representational notation suggest or prompt for?

Do the actions that can be performed on a shared representation in this notation correspond to the potential ideas that we want learners to negotiate and distinctions we want them to attend to?

Do the resulting representations express and make salient the ideas and relationships that learners should revisit and relate to new information?

Are the needs that should be addressed by subsequent activity, such the lack of information, made obvious?

Do the representations capture important aspects of learners’ thinking and expose conflicts between alternative solutions or perspectives?

Stepping beyond the scope of the studies reported here, one might ask: does the notation provide the preferred vocabularies and representational perspectives that constitute both the target skill to be learned as an aspiring member of a community, and focus learning activity on ways of approaching a problem that are productive?

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Understanding misunderstandings

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