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Emergence of Concepts

Vygotsky reported that a concept emerges in separately in two planes: the abstract (scientific) and the experiential.

Source: http://www.ioe.ac.uk/hgm/issues/sess6/sld009.htm

It all depends on the learner, language and teacher

The extent to which an introduced concept will depend on the learners other concepts. A learner who has little experience with ICT may have few or erroneous (spontaneous) notions about the matter at hand. 

Much of the language of ICT is different from everyday language which is likely to further compound the difficulties for the learn striving to achieve a mature concept.

Further more, a tutor with a mature concept of the technology may have difficulties communicating with a beginner: it can, indeed, be a 'foreign language' (sounds without mature concepts)

And the challenges

Teachers and ICT professional must be able to work together in order to ensure the successful incorporation of ICT into teaching and learning. However this raises several challenges for both parties. Consider the following table which attempts to summarise the common starting points for collaboration between an educators and ICT professionals

The above summary suggests the likelihood of difficulties, teachers and IT professionals approach education and technology from very different perspectives. 

• They have different
  • roles ('expert' or 'novice')
  • knowledge bases (range and nature of concepts),  and
  • core processes for their own professional activities

• People may or may not be aware of the (relative) maturity, or otherwise of their concepts which is likely to compound the difficulties in collaboration

• As practicing educators, teachers are well known for ignoring the abstract .  Rather they are largely guided by their insights from experience of 'what works' , that is they work from generalised processes which they customise as required on a moment by moment basis from their experience. These notions are often well developed spontaneous concepts (*). 
• In the busy-ness of teaching, teachers rarely indulge in clarification of the underlying scientific concepts of how and why their practices work. As an illustration of this phenomenon one only needs to the lack of any substantial agreement amongst teachers about a process model for considering pedagogy - this link outlines a tentative process model adopted by this project to enable the project to proceed.
• On the other hand IT professionals need explicit scientific information (#) in order to develop and manage ICT-based tools and artefacts that may be useful to educators in the processes being undertaken. 

From the research so far

One of the most consistent comments from teachers relates to their interaction with ICT support staff. Teachers greatly value those ICT support staff who assist in the development of the teachers' 'spontaneous' understanding of the technology being used. Having an IT problem solved by an IT expert without explanation is thought be teachers to be only very marginally better than not having it fixed at all !!

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