International Digital Makerspace Shared by Students in Six Countries: Theory and Mid-Term Results

• In Event: Internationally Distributed Collaboration With School-Aged Learners and Teachers

Abstract

This paper reports frameworks and results from the midterm of a multiyear IDC project with students from the US, Kenya, Finland, Brazil, Iran, and Namibia (Hamilton and Culp 2016). The paper has three parts. The first part explains the project as a network of 12-15 clubs in these countries, ranging in size from two to twelve members each, engages each member in cross-national team collaborations that produce STEM artifacts (Hamilton and Owens 2018). The project is supported by an informal science grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF).
The second part of the paper delves into the quantitative ethnographic (QE) approach the project employs, and the project’s use of epistemic network analysis (ENA) software in support QE (Shaffer, 2017). ENA software, also developed under NSF support, yields depictions of socio-affective, cultural, and academic variables – and, of crucial importance, the connections between them – that constitute epistemic frames of both individuals and groups. Because they are sensitive to changes that discourse patterns reflect, they have proven valuable to assessing the nature and magnitude of effects of IDC with school-age children.
The paper briefly introduces the QE approach as prelude to the third part, the application of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (Greeno 2016) to introduce a guiding conjecture of this IDC effort.
CHAT provides a complementary framework for articulating how IDC for school-aged learners can function. A common premise of the learning sciences is that activity mediates learning. Rather than preceding or preparing for activity, in other words, learning is embedded in activity systems. This is a key tenet of CHAT. The various constructs of actors, rules and norms, instruments, community, and outcomes form the activity systems that mediate learning (Greeno 2016). This third part of the paper complements the ENA data and analysis with other discourse data that illustrate the CHAT constructs.
More importantly, treating IDC through a lens that focuses on cross-cultural, cross-national shared activity in a virtual space, in pursuit of outcomes (such as STEM challenges or other digital artifacts) changes terms by which school-age learners form perceptions of self and others in parts of the world that are remote to them. The virtual collaboration space, especially in synchronous video settings, enables visual communication with peers in other countries and cultures to take place from the familiarity of a student’s own culture and context (Hamilton 2018). This neutralizes uncertainty, anxiety, or mistrust about those who live elsewhere. It does so by hybridizing physical presence - where the student is enculturated - with virtual presence in a collaborator’s country and culture. This compelling dynamic applies not only to geographic boundary-crossing, but to cultural boundary-crossing that can occur within a country, a region, or even within a city (Hamilton 2018).
This phenomenon is familiar to adults accustomed to international virtual collaborations. For young learners, though, IDC provides opportunity to form understandings of the world by engaging those in other countries and cultures in an anxiety-neutral manner, with perceptions formed not by differences in geography or culture but by shared activity systems.

Authors

• Eric R. Hamilton, Pepperdine University

• Danielle Pascual Espino, Pepperdine University

• Seung Bok Lee

• Zachariah Mbasu, Africa Mathematics Initiative