[SOUND] The next idea that I want to talk about in this discussion of the affordances of these technology media learning environments, is the idea of metacognition. Now, as I say, the idea of metacognition is an old idea. It doesn't necessarily have an awful lot to do with e-learning per se. But the question is, to what extent might these technology mediated environments or these new innovative pedagogical spaces promote the use, or promote students applying these metacognitive capacities. So firstly what's the definition of metacognition, and why do we need it in general, regardless of technology mediated environments? Okay, so what one does when one thinks about the world, one does cognition. And that might be called mathematics, it might be called geography, it might be called writing something down, which is a cognitive process. I've got some thoughts in my head, I'm going to write them down and I'm going to do this in the kind of systematic deliberate way that one does writing. And the end result is a text of a few hundred words. So that, they are learning activities which involve cognition. And I might say, just incidentally, my definition of cognition is not the stuff that happens in your head, which of course is integral. But it's the stuff that you do because or, or related to the stuff that's in your head. So, I am actually writing, let's take that example. I am actually writing. And of course, the writing process is driven by my thinking, but it's a form of action, okay? But also when I'm thinking, it's not just what's in my head. It's a whole lot of resources, which is types of texts, ideas, quotes, notes, sources. So, I'm actually using stuff that I'm bringing in. So, it's not only what's happening in my head, cognition. But, cognition's a part of it. So that's, that's this business of cognition. Okay, so, what's metacognition? Okay, so, while I'm writing that piece of work. And let's say I'm writing a piece of work about about volcanos because I've used that example quite a few times in other parts of this video. Okay, so, I'm writing a piece of work about volcanos. But what I'm doing as I'm writing that piece of work, is that I'm thinking about, well how does one present this information? You know? You might have headings. You might use images. But also, you're using per teacher, particular textural forms around information writing. So you're probably not writing it in the first person. Because information writing normally has this objective aura, you're writing it, you know, in this third person kind of mode. And you're using a whole lot of techniques of information writing, like you've got a concept, the concept of volcano, you're defining it, using examples. So, there are a whole lot of textual things that you do, when you write about volcanos. So, the thinking work is about volcanos. You've got all these sources, and you're writing about volcanos, okay? But the metacogni work, is thinking about how one presents what, what one knows, and how one works with informational texts or how works, one works with information in general. So, okay, we want to do this always in education, you know, whether there's technology mediated learning or not. But you know, the question for me is in what ways technology mediated learning environments might enhance that process, or might support that process, or might support that process and make it easier. So one example is, you know, let's, I'm going to stick to this concrete example for the moment. Is that a web environment, where the review criteria, around an information text beside the text as you write. And where you then peer review another person's work based on those review criteria. And where perhaps, you write a self review when you're finished, which helps you then, rewrite. So, we're actually talking here about formative assessment. But we're talking about a set of reflective processes that sit beside the text. Now, you know, to do peer review in a classical classroom is relatively cumbersome, it can't be anonymous because you can tell what the handwriting is. There are a whole lot of practical things about how technology, mediated environments make this easier to do. But really, what it is, you can set in place a number of processes, where there is this play going on, between cognition, volcanos, and metacognition, the nature of an information text. And where, perhaps what we might do, I mean, remember our model of the e-learning classroom as one which was less teacher-directed where we built the systematic scaffolds between peers as they did their work? So, let's say the next student is already is also writing information text, is writing about insects. Because, look, they really like insects, they're interested in them, and the other student's interested in volcanos, and what the teacher wants to teach is not so much about insects or about volcanos. They're actually doing science or geography, or they're actually doing learning how to write an information text. So, when they review each others work, the only way, if you're not also doing an insects text, to review that work is to think about these metacognitive criteria, around the way information is presented in the world, if you are a scientist, if you are a geographer. If you are a journalist, if you are, well, informational texts exist everywhere in the world, and, and what are the characteristics of those texts, which we can think back, we can think about metacognitively. So this image here is a of a woman reading a book. This is a, you know, a traditional piece of Japanese artwork. But one the interesting things about this world of communicable texts, communicable knowledge. Is that it gets invented in multiple parts of the world at the same time, and actually independently so. What she's reading is Japanese which is historically a derivative of, of of Chinese language. It still has embedded within it a lot of Chinese character sets and whatever. But that gets invented independently in China. Regardless of what actually happens with the invention of writing in Mesopotamia Egypt, Central America, and other places. So, this is another one of these traditions of communicable textual knowledge, and that's the space that we're working in now when we're dealing with the 21st century version of this, with the Internet and commu, computer mediated information and communication systems. It's not actually a huge, or a radical move to do this in technology mediated environments. But the fact that you can run the mechanics of this more easily. The fact that you can have kids doing different assignments against these general criteria. It's just simply a matter of making it easier. So, if you look through these these, you know, seven affordances that, that, that, that I'm working over. A lot of them, as I say, are old ideas in education, but simply making them more practical, or making them more possible is actually a revolutionary move. And once they're possible, it's so much better to do them, and they're so much more powerful as, as learning moves as activity types, as than simply reading the chapter about volcanos, and then writing the essay and handing it in and getting a mark of 76 for it. so, which doesn't necessarily, or only incidentally involves metacognition. You know, it might involve metacognition, with just trying to figure out how to do the essay well, and teacher might explicitly say. Paragraph one, paragraph two, do an introduction, you know, the classic kind of didactic pedagogy. But, you know, this is a way of involving the student in a very active way to think metacognitively, rather than to hear what they're told or just the metacognitive stuff is incidental. So, this is actually a way of building and structuring in this process of metacognition. Which is, as I say, always this dialogue between cognition and metacognition, you know, the actual thing you're talking about and thinking about, the substanding thing on the one hand, and then thinking about thinking. Thinking about the intellectual nature of the task, on the other. So that's one example, for me, of the way in which metacognition comes to play. I want to give one more example in order to illustrate this idea of metacognition. And that is these spaces are ones which are often more dialogical, so if you think about. And again, I want you to compare the student that's writing the, just writing the essay that they hand in and get the mark for. There's not a lot of dialogue. The dialogue is really just, write the thing up, get some comments back from the teacher. who, by the way, is completely overburdened and has too many things to mark, and reads them quite quickly, and. The pain of marking is, is, is in e-, in there every, every moment, every move so and a lot of responsibility on one person, right? But if we're to actually have, so that's the only dialogue in the traditional didactic model. But if we're to actually institutionalize dialogue, and we can do that around blogs. We can do that around wikis, we can drew, we can do that or, in these kind of intrinsically dialogical working spaces. So, for instance one move might be you know, make a blog post, and then everyone else comments. So it's either the teacher making a blog post, and all the students commenting, or each student making a blog post, and other people commenting. Write a wiki, which is, okay you're doing one bit, I'm doing another. Or I'm going back and oh, working over and editing your wiki and so on. So these things are intrinsically dialogical. And one of the points I'd like to make is, that a part of the dialogue which is, you know, update, comment, comment, comment. You know, part of that dialogue is not just to think about the topic that's being spoken intrinsically but it's also the think about the nature of the argument, you know, and to do an intellectual process which I call critique. So somebody makes a particular comment. And number of people have views, and the views then interact with each other dialogically as you go on. Now that almost invariably involves, not only substantive talk about the object of cognition volcanos, insects. But also involves talking about, well what's appropriate evidence, what's appropriate information. You know is this valid, could we know more? So these metacognitive discussions come in as well, in the nature of dialogue. And they're much richer in their possibilities and their scope, than the the kinds of interchanges that simply happen in the, hand in the air say get a comment kind of, kind of interchange. So these are a couple of examples of the ways in which I think these kinds of environments, can nurture metacognition. More practicably, more, more, more easily, more simply, more feasibly than the conventional classroom. [BLANK_AUDIO]