PPIG 2001 - 13th Annual Workshop
A phenomenographic view on the socio-cultural activity theory in research concerning university students’ learning of computer science in an internationally distributed environment
Anders Berglund
Abstract: This PhD student paper discusses a possible approach for studying students’ learning about computer networks in a course that is jointly taught by two universities as an internationally distributed course. Since the students are working in virtual teams, consisting of six students, three in Sweden and three in the US, with a technically advanced assignment, the environment in which the learning takes place has a significant influence on the learning. An approach to studying the students’ experience of their learning as well as their experience of the context of the learning, combining phenomenography with activity system, is proposed. While the experience of the learning is studied with a phenomenographic approach, an activity system seen "from within" through the eyes of a learner is used to analyse the experienced context.