Activity infrastructure

Important to learning is the ability to shape and use the material and social activity infrastructure, “The proper unit of analysis for talking about cognitive change includes the socio-material

environment of thinking. Learning is adaptive reorganization in a complex system” (Hutchins, 1995, p. 289 original emphasis). This section introduces ways that the literature has conceptualised the spaces, processes tools and artefacts where and through which knowledge work happens, placing this in the context of small-group work at the tertiary education level. The particular focus in this study is on what objects and ways of working students choose, use and create in their shared activity. In this sense, the infrastructure to support their identified task is an overarching shared epistemic object. Research question 1, “How do students exercise shared epistemic agency?” is bound up in the infrastructure students create in their activity. This section clarifies what that term means in this study and introduces levels of infrastructure as organising concepts for analysis.

2.5.1 What (When) is ‘infrastructure’?

In knowledge creation, activity is oriented towards objects, but activity is also constituted through tools, technologies, practices, social organisation and norms and a history of situated activity. How and with what is knowledge created, and how is infrastructure assembled and used? This setting or scene of collaborative activity has variously been called infrastructure, environment, “ecology, or ‘landscape,’ of collaboration objects” (Nicolini et al., 2011, p. 627), “epistemic ecology” (Goodwin, 2013), “cognitive ecosystem” (Hutchins, 2012), “constellations of technologies” (Rossitto, Bogdan, & Severinson-Eklundh, 2013), “ecologies of resources” (Damşa et al., 2019), “sedimented (or

‘laminated’) environments” (Goodwin, 2013, p. 8; Hutchins, 2012, p. 315), “assemblages” and “instrumental ensemble (or epistemic infrastructure)” (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017, p. 341), “machineries of knowledge construction” (Nerland, 2018), “bricolage,” “common ground” and, simply, “space” (e.g. Stahl, 2013a). The descriptive terms indicate the potential of surrounding space for the support of knowledge work.

The particular meaning of infrastructure for this study is that situated local ecosystem created by groups in selecting, customising or building from the extensive potential available. I call this purposeful assemblage the ‘activity infrastructure,’ and focus on the situated interplay of objects, tools and processes that each group uses to achieve their goals. This approach aligns with the concept of an “extended ecology of resources” (Damşa et al., 2019, p. 2085) that students need to make sense of and construct to support their epistemic work. Dismiss any mental pictures of a solid, unchanging, provided set of tools, into a more ad-hoc, emergent, mashed-together idea of

infrastructure. Like Star and Ruhleder (1996), “we ask, when—not what—is an infrastructure” (p. 113), since it is a particular activity. This is not a pre-moulded solid concrete bridge with guard rails, but a delicate, swaying suspension bridge extended with whatever is at hand, jungle vines, wire, packing cases, as people cross the river. The activity infrastructure is the evolving answer to ‘how are we going to do this?’ In this context, rather than a noun, we should think of infrastructure as a verb. Students are infrastructuring2 _{their knowledge creation.}

2 _{‘Infrastructuring’ is used in participatory design research to describe curriculum and system co-design}

between stakeholders across systems and institutions (Penuel, 2019) and participatory design in work (Bødker, Dindler, & Iversen, 2017). Here I use the term to refer to the co-design and co-building of infrastructure between students in assessment tasks.

The concepts of affordances and instrumental genesis offer ways of describing students’ infrastructuring.

2.5.2 Affordances and instrumental genesis

In outlining the properties and material agency of objects, it can be said that an object affords or suggests certain actions or interpretations (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2009). Paper pad, email or Google search are part of a background set of familiar and ubiquitous tools, but then selected and drafted into the task-specific activity infrastructure. Tools are objects used to work on other objects, with affordances and constraints for producing, representing and sharing. Tools such as Facebook can be seen to have a sort of ‘third authorship’ (Eisenlauer, 2014) in group communication: for example it automatically dates posts, shows recent posts more prominently, organises threads of conversations and counts the one-click reactions of users. Such social networks “are by no means ‘neutral

environments'” (Eisenlauer, 2014, p. 83) and their affordances help shape people’s activity. Gibson (1986), in his foundational work, describes an affordance in terms of physical properties; an object within the environment, such as a chair, possesses characteristics that a person directly perceives as offering possibilities for action or use. Scholars have subsequently moved towards a post-Gibsonian (Knappett, 2004) concept of affordances that focuses on their indirect, situated, cultural and social aspects, and emphasises the active, agentic role of the person. Any affordance is part of a wider context of which the person gains experience. Knappett (2004) uses Gibson’s

example of a mailbox to note that it is cultural knowledge that discriminates between a post box and a similar object like a litter bin. A bright red colour and a postal service logo are not understood solely by physical properties, but are culturally learned indicators.

Affordances will not always be immediately obvious and will emerge dynamically through usage and manipulation (Ingold, 2012). As an example, if I have no information on or experience reading or authoring blogs, I start with no idea as to their affordances. On being confronted by a blog’s authoring interface for the first time, there are designed cues: a big button (something that looks ‘clickable’ or affords clicking (Norman, 1988)) asking for a ‘new post,’ a section labelled ‘comments’ and a chronological arrangement of posts. Previous experiences participating in online forums or commenting on news items may help orient me. As I use the blog, my experiences publishing posts and receiving comments will increase my understanding of its affordances. Interacting with an object or tool makes more cues available and stimulates new ideas, perspectives and affordances (Kirsh, 2009).

In his research into secondary students’ use of the Knowledge Forum tool, van Aalst (2009) noted that students were not able to easily use the more advanced features that encouraged higher level thinking and that a long-term commitment in curriculum is necessary to cultivate these skills. The affordances of a tool will make it more or less suited to a group’s collaborative work: van Aalst (2009) noted that asynchronous writing should only be used when its use is perceived as best suited to the activity compared to other more direct, social options; it can be time consuming and less effective than a face-to-face discussion of ideas or even text chat (Stahl, 2011).

Affordances can be realised by groups. In a ‘sociality’ of affordances, people collaborating together can recognise “shared affordances that an object offers each of them” (Knappett, 2004, p. 47). It is also possible that affordances may be “negotiated and contested” if people perceive the situation differently or do not share the same goals (Knappett, 2004, p. 47). It is the shared objects that form the locus of interaction, as collaborators make and take meaning as they create knowledge together.

One may see an object as a response to assessment criteria, another as a conduit to understanding a concept. The same person may see both affordances.

The concept of instrumental genesis, based on relational affordances (Overdijk, Diggelen,

Andriessen, & Kirschner, 2014), usefully describes how elements of infrastructure are identified and used. Users take an artefact or potential tool and move from mastering it—learning how to operate or manipulate it—to utilisation in their knowledge work, in effect making it an instrument (Overdijk et al., 2014). The usage of an instrument will be emergent, in “changes that take place as people adjust artefacts to their needs and through their actions, and how artefacts and ideas move back and forth” (Carvalho, Martinez-Maldonado, & Goodyear, 2019). An instrument is constructed in activity, “a mixed entity born of both the subject and artifact,” and a process in which “users continue design in usage” (Rabardel & Beguin, 2005, p. 430). Markauskaite and Goodyear (2017) take this view of an instrument that combines artefact with an extrinsic scheme of use that “both organises past experience and is a resource for future action” (p. 347). They see the process of instrumental genesis as providing a bridge between situated, contextual activity and learning transferable skills. This also links to the idea of fluidity between objects discussed in this chapter and the development of a ‘stable-emergent’ resource through usage (Stahl, 2013a). One of the elements identified in the models of Distributed Cognition for Teamwork (see next section) is “expert

coupling”: as people habitually use a tool, their actions become “tightly coupled with the environment” and they perform better in it (Furniss & Blandford, 2006, p. 1180). However, to respond to a task, “[t]echnology appropriation is difficult because instead of learning discrete and well-specified skills, it requires adapting and changing the cognitive-cultural operating system both at personal and collective levels” (Ritella & Hakkarainen, 2012, p. 254). In instrumental genesis, students learn new ways of working. As students set up their activity infrastructure, they may rely on familiar tools or find new ones to complete their tasks; in the process balancing the effort required to instrumentalise new tools with the ease of use of existing ones.

A study of an English language class at a university applied the concept of affordances and mediation in their observation of the introduction of interactive whiteboards (Johnson, Ramanair, & Brine, 2010). Amongst other affordances, the boards allowed students to see more of the teacher’s face, creating a friendlier atmosphere, and a shared space for all to easily contribute and correct mistakes, motivating participation. Teachers collaborated more on shared teaching materials because they each needed to create new lessons and the boards afforded the facility to share and store files. For students, one effect was that they used English for real communication around the task, focused on the board. Before using the whiteboards, neither students nor staff would have been able to predict how they would change their practices. The affordances of the technology become evident through practice.

2.5.3 Levels of infrastructure

To structure my analysis of activity infrastructure, I use the primary and secondary levels out of the three levels of infrastructure described by Nicolini et al. (2011). They correspond to Bandura’s (1999) “three levels of environmental structures” of sociocultural theory, “the imposed environment, selected environment, and constructed environment“ that offer “gradations of changeability requiring the exercise of increasing levels of personal agency” (p. 24, emphasis added). As the more background level, I describe some aspects of the tertiary (imposed) level of

infrastructure but leave it out of direct analysis. The primary and secondary levels are those most associated with agency.

The secondary level of infrastructure, the ‘selected environment,’ is made up of shared objects and tools related to the task at hand: in the case of university group projects, examples would include the task description and marking rubrics, journal articles, Google Drive and online information sources such as Wikipedia, as well a task-specific technologies such as video editing software. It also includes the social processes of group management, and so encompasses both “technical

infrastructure” and “social infrastructure” (Muukkonen, Lakkala, & Paavola, 2011, p. 175). It provides support for primary knowledge work.

The primary level, constructed environment or ‘epistemological infrastructure’ (Muukkonen et al., 2011), is made up of epistemic objects and activity related to them: what is in formation and represents incomplete and emerging knowledge, for example, co-developed concepts and created artefacts such as diagrams, mind maps, and co-written text.

There is epistemic work done at all levels: for example, when devising ways of working together and managing the collaborative effort in the secondary level. Technical and boundary objects are used in the creation of epistemic objects, and their material and epistemic affordances help shape how this happens. Notwithstanding this overlap, in order to focus on the particular aspects of each, I focus separately on the primary and secondary levels of infrastructure in my case studies. I further expand below on related concepts that I use in analysis of the levels.

First, a brief outline of the tertiary level of infrastructure.

2.5.4 Tertiary level infrastructure

Although it does not figure largely in the cases, the tertiary level of infrastructure provides potential tools to groups. The tertiary level is the imposed or provided environment of email clients, laptops, and structures such as tutorial rooms or campus cafes. These are the familiar, regular, surrounding objects that are taken for granted and “become present only when they stop performing their supporting functions” (Nicolini et al., 2011, p. 623). Star and Ruhleder (1996) similarly state that infrastructure “[b]ecomes visible upon breakdown” (p. 113). An example comes from the study that found that the computers used to power new electronic whiteboards were old and ineffective, resulting in difficulties in using them (Johnson et al., 2010). Something that was set into the background—the purchasing processes and budget of the institution’s technical support—became foreground when the new whiteboards didn’t work as expected. Elements of the tertiary level of infrastructure do appear in my case descriptions, for example when a laptop crashes, a room is noisy or an external drive is corrupted. Infrastructure also becomes visible when groups select and use a custom version of it, in deciding how to collaborate: where and when, and with what tools; even in the imposed environment, people “have leeway in how they construe it and react to it” (Bandura, 1999, p. 23).

Students select certain ubiquitous tools and use the provided environment, and so the tertiary level of infrastructure is present in student activities. However, activity in the primary and secondary levels is where student agency is best observed.

2.5.5 Secondary level infrastructure

The secondary level of technical objects, tools, communications and group management processes is assembled by the group to support activity on their shared task: the social organisation and

technical level of collaboration. This secondary level of infrastructure has to be constructed, and, when groups are establishing their basis for collaboration, is, at least temporarily, a focus for

epistemic work. Objects at this secondary level can transition into primary epistemic objects, then back to technical or boundary objects, as sense is made of how to use them (Nicolini et al., 2011). Objects, including processes, artefacts and tools, are assembled and interpreted. As outlined in previous discussion of objects and affordances, objects give feedback on progress, help shape communications and contribute to how students collaborate. An example of secondary-level impact was observed when a slide of research results was projected in a meeting, at which “interactions visibly switched gears” and became “very focused and participative” between gathered scientists (Nicolini et al., 2011, p. 617). In addition, the “tangibility” of the slide helped it “anchor” and

facilitate discussion (Nicolini et al., 2011, p. 618). Project organisation and ways of sharing (or failing to share) objects influence collaboration.

Next, I introduce Distributed Cognition for Teamwork (DiCoT), which I use to conceptualise and interpret secondary level infrastructure in the case projects.