Situated Learning
From ElateWiki
Situated learning was originated by social anthropologist Jean Lave and educator Etienne Wenger in their book Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (1991). The two proposed that novices learn by participating as apprentices in an applied learning environment peopled by co-learners of various levels of expertise, all the way to domain experts. The intercommunications and collaborations around shared real-world types of problem solving and co-learning activities in this community of practice will enable novices to move from the periphery to the center eventually.
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Learning as a Social Endeavor
Instead of viewing learning as a psychological and individualistic endeavor, the situated learning theory focuses on social interactions that help learners acclimate into a field. This theory defines learning as embedded in a system of activity, communications, culture and context. The “unit of analysis” involves not the learner or the setting but the “relationship between the two” (Barab & Plucker, 2002, as cited in Dede, Nelson, Ketelhut, Clarke & Bowman, 2004, p. 161).
In situated learning, learners go through a kind of “cognitive apprenticeship” and subject matter expert “mentorship” of naïve learners in a community of practice; they move from being a naïve newcomer to an expert through developmental phases of learning and through interacting with subject matter experts. They learn in authentic spaces by engaging in authentic learning work, including in-field communications and planning, contextual immersion, problem-based learning, project-based learning, and creative work.
Communities of practice share practices between individuals, for a collective and interdependent, and individual participant building of learning efficacies.
While such communities may have some leadership, many are self-organizing and dynamic. In communities of practice, peripheral members may lurk and still learn. The memberships of such organizations may be constantly evolving, based on learners’ and participants’ perceived needs and benefits. Communities of practice are seen as learner-centered and collectivist, with common domain-based concerns shared by the group. A community of practice must involve three basic elements: a shared knowledge or learning domain, a community of people in the community, and applied practice (Wenger, 2007, as cited in Smith, 2003, 2009, p. 3). Knowledge then is not decontextualized from where the learning is applied in the real world. A core assumption is that situated learning may result in deep learning and far transfer into the actual work environments.
One implication is that those who bring much effort into the community of practice may get more out of it than those who are passive. The research has found benefits though even for lurkers who may be outwardly passive or apparently non-participatory. Another type of “intentional” situated learning involves even lurking in communications spaces shared by a particular subject-based forum (Chen, 2004).
Technology Enhancement of “Situated Learning” in E-Learning Practice
The co-laboring of those in a community of practice is enhanced with distributed learning technologies. Simulated spaces—that emulate labs, fields, workshops, dentists’ offices, stages, and other locales—enhance the experience of context. Rich user interface designs may be created to emulate machinery for “situated learning.” Wikis help collect knowledge (expressed via multimedia) for information-rich interchanges that help situate learning in more of a global and interactive context. Immersive synthetic worlds offer 3D human-embodied avatar interactivity and intercommunications, along with intelligent agents for human-machine interactions. People may meet online for rich role-play simulations. Communities of practice may collaborate within learning / course management systems and virtual learning environments. Collaborators may work around certain knowledge sets in repositories and digital libraries. Mobile devices may be used for in-field situated learning (for augmented reality learning). Immersive games may be used to situate learning.
Some Examples of Situated Learning in Higher Education
The research literature points to all sorts of situated learning in higher education e-learning. There may be natural language learning in various simulated social contexts and mediated through immersive, interactive virtual environments; this may use human interactions with computer agents to enhance scalable access (Fleischman & Hovy, 2006).
A creative example of mixed reality situated learning involves the building of tactile, audio, and interactive spaces in a museum to enhance the activity-based learning of museum-goers (Wakkary & Hatala, 2007).
Some types of situated learning involve full-body 3D movements in mixed reality spaces focused around physics, chemistry, and poetry respectively (Kelliher, Birchfield, Campana, Hatton, Johnson-Glenberg, Martinez, Olson, Savvides, Tolentino, Phillips, & Uysal, 2009), for full physical expressiveness and possibly to capture the proprioceptive learning.
See Also
References
Chen, F-C. (2004). Passive forum behaviors (lurking): A community perspective. In the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Learning Sciences: Santa Monica, California (pp. 128 – 135).
Dede, C., Nelson, B., Ketelhut, D.J., Clarke, J., & Bowman, C. (2004). Design-based research strategies for studying situated learning in a multi-user virtual environment. In the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Learning Sciences: Santa Monica, California (pp. 158 – 165).
Fleischman, M. & Hovy, E. (2006). Taking advantage of the situation: Non-linguistic context for natural language interface3s to interactive virtual environments. In the proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’06): Sydney, Australia (pp. 47 – 54). Association of Computing Machinery.
Kelliher, A., Birchfield, D., Campana, E., Hatton, S., Johnson-Glenberg, M., Martinez, C., Olson, L., Savvides, P., Tolentino, L., Phillips, K., & Uysal, S. (2009). SMALLab: A mixed –reality environment for embodied and mediated learning. In the proceedings of Multimedia ’09: Beijing, China (pp. 1029 – 1031). Association of Computing Machinery.
Smith, M.K. (2003, 2009). Communities of practice. Infed. Retrieved Feb. 8, 2010, from www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.html.
Wakkary, R. & Hatala, M. (2007). Situated play in a tangible interface and adaptive audio museum guide. Pers Ubiquit Comput: 11 (pp. 171 – 191).