Contextual Support of Social Engagement and Reflection on the Web

The objective of this research is to identify contextual dimensions for learner support in unstructured environments, in which no predefined curriculum and explicit educational guidance is available, and users might be at very different stages on their learning course. Within this scope the particular interest of this thesis is phrased by the following question. How to realize appropriate support strategies and use interaction footprints as a source of information that is suitable for stimulating engagement in social interaction and reflection of self-directed learners on the Web2.0? This question is loosely guided by Schön’s (1983) notion, that today’s professionals are confronted with a range of situations that are highly complex, uncertain, and dynamic. In these situations it is not always possible to apply deterministic and hard empirically grounded methods in ways as it is taught in schools or universities. In other words, professionals have to manage “messes” and make sense of these in order to provide services to their clients (Schön, 1983, p. 18). However, the related learning processes might be unconscious to the learner. Considering this, the question for research becomes “how to support learners in unstructured and emerging environments to become aware of their learning processes”. In order to support learning under these conditions, prior research (Mory, 2003) indicated that feedback has to be appropriate to the context and meaningful the learner. This suggests that responses should be contextualised to the learners’ needs. The approach discussed by this thesis is called indicators. Indicators are simplified representations of selected aspects of complex environments. Actors depend on indicators as contextual information for organising, orientating and navigating through complex environments (Butler & Winne, 1995). Contextual information on the learning process has been proven as important to support learning. This information stimulates the learners' engagement in and commitment to collaborating processes; it helps to raise awareness of and stimulates reflection about social dynamics (Erickson, 2009) and acquired competences (Kreijns, 2004); and it supports thoughtful behaviour in navigation and on learning paths. Despite the evidence on the role of indicators, research has so far considered indicators only as context free sources of information.