Invited Speaker
The keynote will be provided by Michael Baker and is entitled: "Approaches to understanding social interaction in educational situations: a panorama, a road-map and an example of integrating multiple modes of interpretation". Michael Baker is professor and research director at the National Scientific Research Centre at Telecom ParisTech in Paris.
Abstract
Almost all modern theories of learning accord a preponderant role to social interaction and dialogue, as it is mediated by semiotic systems. However, these very general psychological theories have only rarely given rise to models that enable us to understand the precise micro-processes involved in dialogical learning. On the side of communicative interaction and dialogue, the dominant theories and methods, originating in philosophy, linguistics, sociology and social anthropology, were elaborated with research goals that are quite distinct from those of the educational sciences. But it is not obvious, at the present stage of research on social interactions in educational situations, how to genuinely integrate these two fields of research (learning and dialogue). My first aim in this lecture will therefore be to try to build a 'bridge', on the level of theory, between these two different fields of research, beginning from each 'side' and working towards the other 'shore'. I wil argue that the theoretical bridge requires articulating three dimensions: the cognitive, the social, the affective. Following this theoretical exploration, I will explore how this stance affects methodological choices for analysing interactions between students, concentrating on the distinction between "analysis" and "interpretation". I will conclude by raising a 'big question': what are the prospects, in the current state of development of our field, for the elaboration of a theoretical-methodological approach to understanding the interactive elaboration of knowledge?
Vita
Michael Baker graduated in philosophy and psychology (University of Durham, UK, with 1st class honors, 1982) and was awarded the PhD in Cognitive Science in 1989 (Institute for Educational Technology, The Open University, UK) for research on modeling negotiation and argumentation in pedagogical human-machine dialogues. He has been a tenured research scientist, then research director, of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - French National Scientific Research Centre) in Lyon and Paris since the end of his PhD. He did his "habilitation" in 2004 in psychology, on processes of knowledge elaboration in dialogue. For the last 20 years, his main research interest has been the study of the processes of collaborative learning, principally in CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) situations. On an international level, his most well known work concerns analysis of processes of knowledge co-elaboration in argumentative interactions, and the design of structured communication interfaces and workspaces that favor epistemic interactions and conceptual elaboration. He is a founder member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (http://ijcscl.org/). He has co-edited several books, published around 50 journal papers or book chapters, and more internationally reviewed conference papers. His work on CSCL has been carried out mainly in the framework of a series of projects financed by the European Union IST program, within which he has been the CNRS partner manager. He has been the keynote speaker at the International Conference on AI and Education (1993), at the EuroEducation conference (2000), and in many specialized international research symposia over the last ten years. He has directed several nationally funded projects, as well as research workshops.