Task 10: Applying activity theory into practice
by Ilya Shmorgun
Introduction
The purpose of this assignment was to apply activity theory as a method of comparing two online courses: PLENK2010 and NIE2010. Following are my attempts to understand the structure of the courses as well as a chart, which aims to represent the courses as activity systems and break them down into activities, actions and operations. Since my main take away from Activity Theory was that it aims to represent things hierarchically then the use of flowcharts seemed to be the most suitable choice for the task at hand.
Findings
As can be seen from the diagrams the two courses share some similarities. There are also many differences. The PLENK2010 course is structured so that the participants keep the course going by finding, mixing and sharing content with each other. As Valeria mentioned the course can continue as long as its participants do not stop their activities. NIE2010 on the other hand has a fixed timeframe as specified by the schedule and is structured in a more traditional way with assignments getting distributed and students submitting their readings by a certain date. A review of the submitted works is later published by one of the facilitators.
At a first glance it may seem that the NIE2010 course structure is simpler and more straightforward, however the activity system diagram shows more actions and operations at play here. While the PLENK2010 activities are limited to finding the relevant articles and sharing them the NIE2010 course demands taking the ideas found in the articles, analyzing them and then coming up with own ideas and understandings and formalizing them in a blog post.
One of the major differences between courses is also defined by that PLENK2010 is mainly built on collaboration between participants while NIE2010 does not really require students to read each other’s works in order to complete the assignment.
Conclusion
Activity theory provides an interesting perspective to the process of doing research. Being hierarchical in nature it lets the researcher break down an object of analysis into smaller pieces in order to discover relationships and patterns. This can also lead to unexpected results while doing comparisons between different objects of research as was discovered in this particular assignment. While at first the NIE2010 course seemed to be more straightforward the activities involved in completing a single assignment were are actually more vast and complex.
It would interesting to try applying activity theory in the process of doing interaction design in order to see what patterns and relationships between goals, activities and operations can emerge in the process of creating a new product or service.
