Fostering teacher-student interaction and learner autonomy by the I-TUTOR Maps

Abstract

The paper analyses the use of an automatically generated map as a mediator; that map visually represents the study domain of a university course and fosters the co-activity between teachers and students. In our approach the role of the teacher is meant as a mediator between the student and knowledge. The mediation (and not the transmission) highlights a process in which theres no deterministic relation between teaching and learning. Learning is affected by the students previous experiences, their own modalities of acquisition and by the inputs coming from the environment. The learning path develops when the teachers and the students visions approach and, partly, overlap. In this case we have co-activity. The teacher uses artifacts-mediators in such a process (Bruner). The automatically generated map can be considered a mediator. The paper describes the experimentation of the artifact to check if its use fosters: (1) the elicitation of the different subjects perspectives (different students and the teachers), and (2) the structural coupling that is the creation of an empathic process between the perspectives of the teacher and the student as the way to enable co-activity processes between teaching and learning. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.