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From Discourses on Learning in Education (2022)

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From Discourses on Learning in Education (2022)

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Activity Theory is a perspective that takes into account the knower’s history, motivations, mediating artefacts (language, tools, etc.), community, situation, and culture.

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Activity Theory - Discourses on Learning in Education

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Activity Theory simultaneously considers the individual's cognition and the social reality by focusing on "activity systems" - that is, taking into account the knower's history, motivations, mediating artefacts (language, tools, etc.), community, situation, and culture. More broadly, it looks at systems comprising multiple actors, such as teams and organizations, with...

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In simple terms, Activity Theory is all about 'who is doing what, why and how'. However, things are rarely
that simple.

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From the Journal of Applied Instructional Design (2022)

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From the Journal of Applied Instructional Design (2022)

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Paragraph 14: Activity theory explicates how learners might operate and navigate activity during a social learning process, thus aligning with theories rooted in Vygotskian social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978) such as distributed cognition or situated learning theory.

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37 minutes

Introduction

The field of instructional design has experienced a number of shifts that have influenced its focus, methods, and identity, ultimately reshaping and redirecting the field. Gagné's concept of instructional systems design gave way to the now-common moniker of instructional design, which in turn has been supplanted by the term learning design. These changes in terminology historically have been predicated by broader shifts in the philosophical underpinnings of the field. The roots of instructional systems design can be found in behaviorist theories of knowledge acquisition (Gagné & Briggs, 1974), which eventually led to more cognitivist perspectives (Schuh & Barab, 2008), which in turn gave way in the early 1990s to more constructivist approaches (Honebein, 1996; Jonassen, 1991). This consequently signaled a shift from more objective epistemological views to an understanding of knowledge as more subjective and individualistic (Ertmer & Newby, 2013). With this came a recognition of the centrality of the learner to the learning process, and a move away from traditionally more instructor-centric approaches (e.g., Soloway et al., 1994). Key to learner-centric approaches is a recognition of the learner as central to the design process.

Theorists have increasingly begun to extend beyond cognitive and behavioral approaches to education and towards elements of human-computer interaction (HCI; Gray et al., 2020). More recently, theorists have begun to embrace elements of user experience (UX), which is used to design technologies in human-centered ways that are engaging, functional, and user-friendly (McLellan, 2000; Schmidt et al., 2020). Borrowing practices from user experience design (UXD) and applying them to learning design practice has led to productive application of associated methods and processes, with clear, practical value for the design of digital environments for learning (Dimitrijević & Devedžić, 2021; Haldane et al., 2019; Matthews et al., 2017; Shernoff et al., 2020). When UX methods are applied in the field of LIDT, the focus on the user of a technology system necessarily shifts to a focus on the learner-as-user of a given learning technology, e.g., learning management system, serious game, virtual learning environment, etc. (Jahnke et al., 2020). The learner experience (LX), therefore, can be characterized as an emergent quality influenced by many aspects of the learner's interaction with the given learning technology (Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006; Schmidt & Huang, 2021). These include ease-of-use, appeal, context of application, learner's goal orientation, etc.

There is little argument that digital environments for learning should be designed in a way that effectively embodies learning theory and facilitates meaningful learning. However, designs of many existing digital environments for learning are conceived primarily from the perspective of a siloed learning theory. All too often, designers of such systems fail to consider the broader notion of LX (Gray, 2016). This is not to suggest a lack of expertise, but rather that considerations of LX from this more holistic lens has not been a central focus. This could be due to a myriad of challenges, including limited budgets, protracted timelines, a lack of buy-in with stakeholders, and so-on. Applying a siloed, narrow view of learning design introduces the risk of developing a digital environment for learning based on sound theory (e.g., cognitive load, cognitive flexibility) that lacks sufficient consideration of issues that are traditionally seen as more relevant to the field of HCI, for example, fluid navigation or minimalist design. This could lead to the design of a digital environment for learning that conveys the technical aspects of a content area, but is not necessarily enjoyable, pleasing, or easy to use. A purely theoretical orientation to design in itself might not take into account the myriad of variables that can influence a learner's individual experience while engaged in technology-mediated learning. For example, an interface, online course, or learning module that is difficult to use could impact learners' acceptance and perceived utility of the technology (Venkatesh et al., 2003) and ultimately could impede learning.

Learning designers are confronted by challenges on a range of fronts when attempting to apply UXD methods to learning design. One of the issues has to do with the lack of clarity around the concept of learning experience design (LXD). In the field of HCI, the term UX has become common parlance, although it is not well understood (Law et al., 2009). This is perhaps because UX consists of multiple variables that are not agreed-upon or consistently considered and because it lacks a coherent unit of analysis. In this sense, a parallel can be drawn between UX and LXD, in that terms and concepts related to LXD abound in practice, despite the lack of clear definitions and methodological frameworks (Schmidt & Huang, 2021).

Another challenge in LXD is how to contextualize individuals as they employ learning technologies. However, studies show that designers struggle regarding how to design the context that embodies the experience of users. In the realm of UX design, practitioners will often develop personas and scenarios to provide design context. These methods are equally valuable in learning design, as it is often difficult for designers to remain cognizant of the emergent needs of learners as they navigate the learning space, work with peers, and perform other learning tasks. Personas, in general, are archetypes of users who might employ the technology within their specific usage context (Miaskiewicz & Kozar, 2011). In learning design, specifically, personas are archetypes of learners who might engage in a learning activity using a learning technology (e.g., LMS, mobile app, serious game). Scenarios are narratives that describe user activity in a story format (Carroll, 2000). Both scenarios and personas can be incredibly valuable when employed for learning design.

We argue that personas and scenarios are a useful tool for situating learning designs within the lived experiences of individual learners. Traditionally, learner analysis and context analysis are recognized as critical aspects of instructional design . Articulating learner and contextual characteristics and deriving learner needs is most often performed within the context of front-end analysis. However, approaches to learner and contextual analysis can be quite general. Learner analysis methods tend to characterize learners based on measures relevant to a given content area (e.g., reading level, attendance, quiz results, performance metrics) and often are garnered through indirect means, for example from grade rosters or from interactions with subject matter experts (SMEs). Contextual analysis tends to take a narrow view, focusing primarily on the immediate context of learning (e.g., school, training program, etc.) as opposed to a broader conceptualization that might consider social, physical, and political factors. However, context plays a critical role in understanding the broader ecosystem that encompasses learning (Tessmer & Richey, 1997). Contextual factors are fundamentally and inextricably interconnected with learner considerations, such as prior knowledge, common experiences, shared social mores, etc. (Smith & Ragan, 2005). Socio-cultural factors shape cognition (Järvenoja et al., 2015), influence recall of prior knowledge and enhance meaning (Shepherd, 2011), and can promote transfer of knowledge and skills to novel situations (Tessmer & Richey, 1997). Our field has accepted that learners' operate and engage in meaning-making as negotiative practice within socio-cultural contexts (Brown et al., 1989). Indeed, "acts take their meaning in relation to the social worlds (or communities of practice or activity systems) in which individual actors participate and to the actors' positions or identities in those contexts" (Nolen, 2020, p. 1). Design methods that lead to deeper considerations of individual learners and take into account the broader socio-cultural ecology in which meaning-making is situated therefore could provide useful tools for instructional designers seeking to advance more learner-centered methods. To this end, personas and scenarios are promising; however, how they are situated more broadly within a design ecology must be articulated, which we discuss later in this paper.

The purpose of the current article is to highlight how one theoretical perspective that finds resonance in LIDT-activity theory-can be applied synergistically with specific methods of UXD-personas and scenarios-to inform the design of digital environments for learning. We argue this synergy allows for embodiment of theory while concurrently promoting positive learner experiences. Activity theory provides parameters for contextualizing technology usage within a framework that not only considers the interaction of the learner with the technology tool, but also the broader context within which that interaction takes place. In the following sections, we briefly describe activity theory and how it informs iterative design of digital environments for learning in a UCD process. Real-world case examples from our own learning design practice are provided. We conclude with a discussion of implications, and consider how similar approaches might be adopted by others in the field.

Activity Theory

Understanding learners' experiences when engaged in technology-mediated learning could benefit from a more holistic perspective of HCI (Barab et al., 2004; Nardi, 1996). One theory that finds resonance in both HCI and LIDT is activity theory. Activity theory argues that activity and consciousness are dynamically and inextricably interrelated. The theory considers the broader context and culture from which learning emerges, and thus has important implications for describing how learners think and reason within the world around them, how they engage in meaning-making, and how they develop understanding within their social context. In the field of LIDT, Jonnasen and Rohrer-Murphy (1999) explained it thusly: "conscious learning emerges from activity (performance), not as a precursor to it. So activity theory provides us with an alternative way of viewing human thinking and activity" (p. 62). From an activity theory perspective, actions are purposeful, social, mediated, multilevel, and developed through interaction between subjects and the objective world (i.e., objects). In doing so, activity theory explicates a variety of constructs to detail how an individual uses tools within an activity system and social context to engage in goal directed behavior (see Figure 1). From an end-user perspective, activity theory describes the individual and his/her role as it relates to the intersection of tasks (activity) and group-level work (action). As s/he completes a given task with available tools, s/he engages in goal-directed behaviors through established rules, such as norms and processes. Alternatively, the community can connect to the object through division of labor (Yamagata-Lynch, 2010). The theory is thus descriptive in that it takes into consideration how individuals (a) manage the contextual constructs of division of labor, rules, and community and (b) employ technology for achieving specific outcomes.

Activity theory includes multiple LXD implications for designers of learning environments. First, activity theory as applied to LXD details explicit constructs important to the learning context, in juxtaposition to approaches that might focus more on a content-driven approach to learning design (e.g., flipped classroom). Rather than viewing content as a body of knowledge to be transmitted to the learner and subsequently attained, the cultural constructs of activity theory describe the broader context in which knowledge construction takes place. It follows that understanding this phenomenon requires one to critically consider the artifacts and technology that mediate that learning process (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2018; Yamagata-Lynch, 2007) and how those constructs are situated and interoperate within elements of the activity system. Technology, therefore, is not only an instrument available to a learner for completing an action, but also plays a role in allowing meaning-making to emerge within a community (Barab et al., 2004). Therefore, meaning-making is not only an individual endeavor, but is also an emergent property of the entire activity system.

Figure 1

Activity system diagram

Diagram of an activity system as conceptualized by Engeström, illustrating connections between subject, instruments, object, and outcome, as well as rules, community, and division of labor.

(Engeström, 2000). CC BY 2.0.

Although most learning designers consider learners from the perspective of needs assessment, consideration is largely absent in learning design of how learning activities connect with the broader bounds of the learning community (Gray et al., 2020; York & Ertmer, 2011). Given activity theory's emphasis on activity as a multifaceted and mediated phenomenon between the subject, tool and object, it "prompts the designer to look beyond the immediate operation or action level and to understand the use of the designed tool in terms of the more comprehensive, distributed, and contextualized activity. This shift places emphasis on understanding not simply the subject but the entire context" (Barab et al., 2004, p. 203). As opposed to a narrow view of embodying a specific theory or model within a technology interface (e.g., cognitive load theory; ARCS model), an activity theory lens considers requisite technology features for affording specific actions towards learning goals, including how to interact with peers and share responsibility for tasks. Moreover, it allows designers to consider how implementing and/or changing technology tools might impact social dynamics and the learning process. Adoption of an activity theory lens by learning designers, therefore, has the potential to promote a more holistic and comprehensive view of learning as goal-oriented meaning-making activity, mediated by technological tools, and circumscribed by the broader context of the learning community, its rules, and its division of labor.

Development and application of personas and scenarios using activity theory

Designers of learning environments often approach development from a learning theory perspective to engender self-directed learning, motivation, and other learning outcomes. However, socio-cultural approaches suggest that designers of these environments should not only consider theories that circumscribe our understanding of learning, but also the broader contexts in which learning occurs (Jonassen et al., 1994). Activity theory explicates how learners might operate and navigate activity during a social learning process, thus aligning with theories rooted in Vygotskian social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978) such as distributed cognition or situated learning theory. Therefore, activity theory could prove to be a useful tool for learning designers when applied in conjunction with established design practices (such as in the development and application of personas and scenarios) to elaborate the broader ecology of learning with technology. As it relates to LX and personas, activity theory can provide a more comprehensive understanding of how learning technology is used, by whom, under what conditions, with what kinds of supports, and for what kinds of outcomes. This provides a lens for designers to consider a broad range of issues towards the development of a learning environment that considers not only effectiveness, but also efficiency and appeal (Honebein & Honebein, 2015). In the following sections we provide case examples detailing this.

Case 1: Supporting Mobile Health Design Using Personas

Designing learning experiences within health contexts presents unique challenges. Learners are often patients with health conditions that impact their quality of life and general well-being. Stakes can be high, for example, for someone recently diagnosed with diabetes learning to take medications regularly to control debilitating symptoms, or for someone after sustaining a concussion learning how to gradually return to activities to improve recovery. However, learning designers seldom have direct experience with the myriad of health-related issues they may encounter in practice. Similarly, the SMEs with whom learning designers might collaborate (e.g., physicians, nurses) may have deep domain knowledge and practice-based experience but be professionally distant from the lived experiences their patients might face. In this case study, we describe how we used personas within our own design practice to promote empathy with patients and to better understand how we could design more holistically so as to meet their learning needs within their socio-cultural contexts.

Mobile health (mHealth) is defined as "the use of mobile computing and communication technologies in health care and public health" (Free et al., 2010, p. 1). mHealth applications have been shown to improve healthcare by reducing costs, promoting accessibility, and improving individualized treatment (Steinhubl et al., 2013). Increasingly, human-centered design approaches are being adopted to develop mHealth interventions, commonly referred to as patient-centered design (Chiauzzi et al., 2020; Hernandez-Ramos et al., 2021). Within this context, personas are often developed to guide design (Ayubi et al., 2014; Haldane et al., 2019). In our own mHealth design practice, we apply human-centered design methods within the frame of LXD. Our LXD process utilizes personas to guide mHealth design. Developing personas begins by performing empathy interviews with representative patients. Interviews are then transcribed, and salient quotes and topics are categorized using affinity mapping techniques (Lepley, 1999). These affinity maps are then used as inputs for developing patient personas (Figure 2), a process that bears some similarity to that described in Siricharoen (2021).

Figure 2

Process of creating personas through distillation of empathy interview data using empathy mapping techniques

Process model diagram illustrating how personas can be created using empathy interviews and empathy maps

Our process of developing personas follows design thinking processes (Chokshi & Mann, 2018; Ector et al., 2020) that begin with empathy interviews and are followed by empathy mapping (Klamerus et al., 2019; Weijers et al., 2021). Although techniques such as empathy interviews, empathy mapping, and development of personas are widely used methods in UXD and design thinking circles, application of empathy methods in the field of learning design is less prevalent, but has garnered some attention both in research (e.g., Mehta & Gleason, 2021; Morel, 2021; Tracey & Hutchinson, 2019) and in practice (e.g., C. Gray et al., 2015; Matthews et al., 2017). Empathy interviews and empathy mapping are methodological tools that provide a means to learn what is important to learners, to reveal emotional and perhaps tacit insights, to explore behaviors, needs, and challenges, and ultimately to develop a deep understanding for the daily lived experiences of target learners. Empathy interviews take the form of a series of open-ended questions tailored to the situation and target users. In general, empathy interviews are one-on-one conversations that elicit stories about specific experiences of interviewees. Although interview questions are personalized, following a protocol helps interviewers advance "the principles of being intentional, human-centered, and equity-focused" (Nelsestuen & Smith, 2020, p. 2). Different from other types of interviews, empathy interviews aim to promote empathy, which requires interviewers to immerse, observe, and engage during the interviews (Doorley et al., 2018).

To distill key information from empathy interviews into discrete categories, we employ empathy mapping techniques. Empathy mapping was originally developed as a tool for gamestorming (D. Gray et al., 2010). To create an empathy map, learning designers categorize interview notes based on what the interviewee was saying, doing, thinking, and feeling. The newly organized information helps designers focus on the interviewee's emotions and experiences-central elements of human-centered design. Figure 3 presents an example empathy map developed in the context of blood glucose management for type 1 diabetes.

Figure 3

Empathy map developed in the context of type 1 diabetes management

Example empathy map showing four quadrants, labeled "say," "think," "do," and "feel"

Following empathy interviews and empathy mapping, personas are developed. Within our three-stage process, personas are essentially artefacts of empathetic understanding that can be continually referenced across design phases. The multi-stage process of developing personas serves multiple purposes from a learning design perspective. First, the process brings the designer directly into contact with representative members of the target population and requires the designer to engage in deep, personal questioning so as to elicit aspects of everyday life and lived experiences of the people for whom the intervention is being developed. Next, because patients often relay intensely personal and challenging vignettes from their lives and how their quality of life has been impacted by health-related challenges, the experience can be visceral, emotional, and sometimes painful-descriptors that are not often associated with learning design. By eliciting participant narratives of lived experiences, learning designers are provided a lens through which empathy can develop, that is, they can develop shared understanding and experience with target learners by intentionally seeking to uncover details about other people's situations, feelings, and lived experiences. Finally, empathy interviews can serve as a conduit that can promote the emotional disposition of empathetic concern (Warren, 2018) and the cognitive dimension of perspective-taking (Gasparini, 2015) for LX designers. An example persona is provided in Figure 4.

Figure 4

Example persona of "Ben," an adolescent with type 1 diabetes who is struggling to manage his blood glucose levels

Example persona of a fictional user named Ben, an adolescent with diabetes. Persona includes information on demographics, attitude, behavior, motivation, and adherence barriers

Having established our process of persona development within the context of mHealth design, we now turn to theoretical considerations. Specifically, we consider how personas help to frame learning design from an activity theory lens. Different aspects of activity theory provided inputs for development of empathy interviews, so as to uncover aspects of lived experience that may be more tacit. For example, in type 1 diabetes blood glucose management, identification of subjects, tools, and objects is rather straightforward. However, consideration of rules, community, and distribution of labor unveils challenges that interrelatedly complicate blood glucose management. For example, we learned from empathy interviews that supporting insulin adherence is a community endeavor with multiple subjects involved, including parents/caregivers, healthcare providers, and peers, and that division of labor requires effective communication, often supported by a range of technologies. How this manifests is highly individualized and often develops unintentionally based on reaction to emergent challenges. This, in turn, results in localized rules that often are tacit and sometimes ineffective. Drawing an example from the persona in Figure 4, Ben's mother is supposed to remind Ben before school to check his blood sugar and take insulin, but she sometimes is at work and is unable to remind Ben. Not only does this result in undesirable outcomes related to taking insulin, this simple deviation resonates across the entire activity system in unpredictable ways, which potentially can amplify these undesirable outcomes. This has ramifications for learning design, and provides an opportunity for learning designers to consider not only how interventions can be designed to ameliorate these issues, but also how the intervention influences not only the outcome of potentially improved medication adherence, but also communication between subjects (community), making rules explicit and applying them with fidelity (rules), and understanding who is responsible for what (division of labor).

Figure 5

LXD of Diabetes Journey learning environment through lens of activity theory

Activity theory diagram that has been annotated with specific details from the Diabetes Journey case example

Case 2: Supporting Case Library Design Using Scenarios

The case of Nick's Dilemma illustrates how a learning environment can be designed based on sound theoretical foundations, but nevertheless fail to be used effectively due to insufficient consideration of how learners would interact with the technology within their specific learning contexts. The authors of this chapter were involved in a multi-phase, design-based research project to develop an online case library that would support learners in problem-based learning (Schmidt & Tawfik, 2018; Tawfik & Jonassen, 2013). In this problem-based learning (PBL) environment, the student reads about how the protagonist, Nick, must hire a new individual for his sales team with his boss, Sheila. The ill-structured problem outlines how Nick and Sheila are under intense pressure as they increasingly lose customers to market competition. The learner is confronted with three potential solutions to mitigate turnover within their medical device sales team. The learner can either (1) hire an internal candidate, (2) hire an external candidate, or (3) advertise the position again in a local newspaper. Each option has a range of benefits and drawbacks that the learner must identify and consider in making a decision.

The design team used the theoretical lens of case-based reasoning (CBR) to support novices as they used the PBL environment, a theory that rests on the notion that individuals use prior experiences stored in long-term memory to solve new problems. When an individual lacks any relevant prior experience to reference, they can be provided curated stories from a database (called a 'case library') to serve as 'vicarious memory' (Kolodner & Guzdial, 2000). According to CBR theory, learners read these digital cases and then apply the lessons learned towards the main problem to solve (Riesbeck & Schank, 2013). A CBR approach to PBL therefore mitigates a novice's experiential gap and uses similar cases as scaffolds from which learners can draw lessons learned (Tawfik & Kolodner, 2016).

The design team did not explicitly develop personas during their design, but instead inferred what a typical user would be like from needs assessment. Findings from needs assessment suggested that learners were upper-level juniors and seniors enrolled in a postsecondary Sales Management course at a large midwestern university. Conversations with the SME unveiled a concern that learners were too focused on finding the "right" answer while meeting the minimum requirements of a given assignment, which led the SME to believe the students lacked the critical thinking skills needed for entering the workforce. From this, the designers inferred that the "typical learner" would be a college student enrolled in the marketing class. This learner would use the learning environment as intended to access a set of hyperlinked cases to solve the problem faced by Nick and Sheila. By providing learners with cases, they would be able to encounter "vicarious memories" that would provide a stand-in for the real-world experience that the SME felt was lacking.

While the learning environment was designed to align with many aspects of case-based reasoning, the assumed student persona lacked sufficient detail to consider how the learning environment would be used in context. Specifically, we failed to consider the process of learning with PBL, group dynamics, classroom culture, and other factors. Again, activity theory allows us to construct a scenario for the persona. To re-imagine this persona and scenario through activity theory, the learner (subject) attempts to resolve the problem faced by Nick and Sheila (objective). Given that the students had little or no experience, the database of related stories (case library) serves as the tool needed to help accomplish the task. Upon reflection, the top half of the activity pyramid (subject, object, tool) is well articulated and described by the lense of activity theory.

While the interface technically aligned with the tenets of CBR, activity theory articulates ways to situate the persona within the scenario as it relates to the rules, division of labor, and community within the activity system (Figure 5). For example, an important aspect of engaging in PBL includes the importance of learning from peers. However, our design failed to include any features that would support division of labor. If we evaluated our student persona and scenario through the lens of activity theory, we might have included features that supported collaborative learning and division of labor, including assigned tasks (e.g., information gathering), shared tasks, and artifact sharing. As it stood, students had to leverage other resources outside the learning environment to manage the division of labor, which could have presented challenges from a learning experience design perspective.

Consideration of our student persona through activity theory constructs identify other opportunities to improve the design. In this activity system, the community includes existing peer groups and classroom culture. The class was structured such that learners were assigned to groups near the beginning of class as they worked with their peers, which helped develop a smaller community among two to three peers. There was also the broader learning community of the business school, which emphasized portfolios and preparation for the business setting. If we had considered this as part of our persona and design, the learning technology could have included options to publish to their portfolio or possibly microcredentials/badges that reinforced the culture of the business school

Finally, activity theory also highlights the importance of rules. There are rules about university-wide initiatives (course conduct), but also rules on the course level rules related to due dates. We found that learners were especially mindful of the due dates for the final assignment, but this was not always easy to access and created unnecessary clicks to find this information within our initial design. There were additional rules about the assignment, such as the length and format, which required students to access. Other tangential rules applied, such as plagiarism, were not explicitly described within our learning environment.

In this instance, a scenario using activity theory could be as follows:

"On Monday, Javy opens up his assignment tab in his LMS and noticed a newly assigned task from his instructor. As he reads the description, he notices that he needs to work with his assigned classmates and submit a two-page argumentative essay. It seems as though there are more details when clicking on the link, which he does.

The main page has narrative at the top and directions on the bottom, such as how long the essay is and when to turn things in. The narrative says two weeks, although he's trying to line that up with the due date listed in the LMS. At the same time, he's not quite clear about whether or not he has to cite sources like he did with his prior assignments and classes in the business school.

As he opens the screen, he reads the main problem to solve as it details Sheila and Nick must make a decision about how to build their sales management team. Throughout the narrative he also notices hyperlinks at what seems to be important decision points such as considering prior experience, hiring from within, or considering alternate individuals from outside the company. It's not totally clear, but it seems like the related cases are connected around these big ideas. By the time he's read the fourth case, he's frustrated because he's constantly hopping back and forth across the different tabs.

After he reads the problem to solve and related cases, he meets with his other group members (Taylor and Jaren). Taylor offers to read the cases and make a bullet point summary for each one, while Jaren offers to look for some additional sources such as his textbook. It's a little unclear how they will share the resources at first, but eventually they decide to each upload a document to cloud storage and they will try to reconcile what has been learned across the various sources. Because this is an online course, they'll mostly share their ideas via the class discussion board. Once that is done, Javy offers to draft an initial version of the argumentation essay and then share it for his peers to view. Once they review, he double checks the assignment again as to whether one person needs to submit it or if each individually has to submit. Finally, he uploads an additional copy for the business portfolio that he needs to submit to the College of Business prior to graduation.

Figure 6

LXD of Nick's Dilemma learning environment through lens of activity theory

Activity theory diagram that has been annotated with specific details from the Nick's Dilemma case example

Whereas our initial design was focused on a learner (subject) employing the case library (tool) to submit an argumentative essay (objective), an activity theory-driven persona and scenario could have caused us to consider easy access of the assignment description to minimize unnecessary navigation. The interface could have also linked to additional rules, such as plagiarism and due dates, that were already established. In doing so, this would have allowed us to expand beyond a siloed understanding of the persona and thus allow the design team to better consider the overall learner experience.

Conclusion

As educators increasingly employ technology to support learning, there is a need to design and develop tools that effectively support the knowledge construction process. In many cases, theories that guide LX are rarely prescriptive and only recently emerging, therefore specific guidance for how they might be applied to design is lacking. While previous approaches may be content-driven (e.g., flipped classroom) or informed by theory (e.g., cognitive load), they may not consider the full extent of the learning experience design. Determining how to balance educational theory inspiration with the broader learner experience is ultimately left to the discretion of the learning designer. This is an area in which learning designers potentially can benefit from UXD methods and processes. Indeed, some learning designers have begun to adopt these methods. However, research suggests that learning designers tend to incorporate UXD methods and processes in ways that are incomplete and rudimentary. For example, learner personas might be developed, but then never referenced or used to inform design. UXD processes like wireframing or rapid prototyping might be employed, but without evaluating the designs with actual learners. Learning designs might be evaluated, but in simplistic ways such as quasi-expert review or other ad-hoc approaches. More robust processes are available, but are not often used.

One way to enhance the socio-technical design of learning environment is by espousing a human-computer interaction perspective, which allows us to not only consider what the s/he is learning, but the unique interactions that impact their learning process. HCI perspectives explicate methodologies and issues related to usability, but they also detail broader socio-cultural context of the user. To date, activity theory has been used to describe how individuals work together in many collaborative learning contexts. This theory further posits that individuals (subjects) seek out context-specific tools to achieve targeted tasks (object). However, the subject does not complete this task in isolation; rather, they different tools to complete the activity within their settings. Activity theory further outlines how s/he is connected to a social group as they complete said activity, which are often then used to divide responsibilities among the group members (division of labor) (Engeström, 2017; Sannino & Engeström, 2017). Finally, rules are the informal and formal regulations that govern the task and group dynamics (Yamagata-Lynch, 2010), which are used to describe the importance of social learning and peers scaffolding (MacLeod & van der Veen, 2020).

We argue that the constructs detailed in activity theory can address some of the challenges that designers face, especially as it relates to creating personas and the scenarios where learning takes place. Indeed, Gray (2016) cautioned that "even when designers believed in the value of personas, they did not use this perspective in their visible design processes. What this might suggest is some disjuncture between reported use of methods and the actual design activity" (p. 4045). The literature suggests problems arise because personas are often ill-defined (Chang et al., 2008), lack clarity (Holden et al., 2017), and used in ways not directly tied to design (T. Matthews et al., 2012). Using activity theory to construct scenarios for personas can help elucidate some of the contextual considerations of how a user engages in the learning process with technology. Activity theory applied to personas can develop scenarios that highlight the role of technology, but also the user's community, rules, and division of labor where the learning takes place. By detailing a more holistic context of the learner, design approaches that utilize activity theory can thus be used as a mechanism to identify limitations and improvements for digital learning environments. In doing so, designers can develop environments that better consider learner's dynamic interactions within their socio-cultural context.

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Activity Theory as a Lens for Developing and Applying Personas and Scenarios in Learning Experience Design

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Theoretically-informed design is a hallmark of the field of learning and instructional design and technology (LIDT). Designing digital environments for learning on the basis of theory can lead to theoretically pure and potentially effective learning interventions, yet theory alone is insufficient to consider the myriad of issues that emerge while a learner is engaged in digitally mediated learning.

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Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) is a theoretical framework which helps to understand and analyse the relationship between the human mind (what people think and feel) and activity (what people do).

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Cultural-historical activity theory ( CHAT) is a theoretical framework which helps to understand and analyse the relationship between the human mind (what people think and feel) and activity (what people do). It traces its origins to the founders of the cultural-historical school of Russian psychology L. S. Vygotsky and Aleksei N. Leontiev. Vygotsky's important insight into the dynamics of consciousness was that it is essentially subjective and shaped by the history of each individual's social and cultural experience. Especially since the 1990s, CHAT has attracted a growing interest among academics worldwide. Elsewhere CHAT has been defined as "a cross-disciplinary framework for studying how humans purposefully transform natural and social reality, including themselves, as an ongoing culturally and historically situated, materially and socially mediated process". Core ideas are: 1) humans act collectively, learn by doing, and communicate in and via their actions; 2) humans make, employ, and adapt tools of all kinds to learn and communicate; and 3) community is central to the process of making and interpreting meaning - and thus to all forms of learning, communicating, and acting.

The term CHAT was coined by Michael Cole and popularized by Yrjö Engeström to promote the unity of what, by the 1990s, had become a variety of currents harking back to Vygotsky's work.

CHAT traces its lineage to dialectical materialism, classical German philosophy, and the work of Lev Vygotsky, Aleksei N. Leontiev and Aleksandr Luria, known as "the founding troika" of the cultural-historical approach to Social Psychology. In a radical departure from the behaviorism and reflexology that dominated much of psychology in the early 1920s, they formulated, in the spirit of Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, the concept of activity, i.e., "artifact-mediated and object-oriented action". By bringing together the notion of history and culture in the understanding of human activity, they were able to transcend the Cartesian dualism between subject and object, internal and external, between people and society, between individual inner consciousness and the outer world of society. Lev Vygotsky, who created the foundation of cultural-historical psychology, based on the concept of mediation, published six books on psychology topics during a working life which spanned only ten years. He died of TB in 1934 at the age of 37. A.N. Leont'ev worked with Lev Vygotsky and Alexandr Luria from 1924 to 1930, collaborating on the development of a Marxist psychology. Leontiev left Vygotsky's group in Moscow in 1931, to take up a position in Kharkov. There he was joined by local psychologists, including Pyotr Galperin and Pyotr Zinchenko. He continued to work with Vygotsky for some time but, eventually, there was a split, although they continued to communicate with one another on scientific matters. Leontiev returned to Moscow in 1934. Contrary to popular belief, Vygotsky's work per se was never banned in Stalinist Soviet Russia. In 1950 A.N.Leontiev became the Head of the Psychology Department at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Lomonosov Moscow State University (MGU). This department became an independent Faculty in 1966 due mainly to his hard work. He remained there until his death in 1979. Leontiev's formulation of activity theory, post 1962, had become the new "official" basis for Soviet psychology. In the two decades between a thaw in the suppression of scientific enquiry in Russia and the death of the Vygotsky's continuers, contact was made with the West.

Michael Cole, then a young Indiana University psychology post-graduate exchange student, arrived in Moscow in 1962 for a one-year stint of research under Alexandr Luria. Keenly aware of the gulf between Soviet and American psychology, he was one for the first Westerners to present Luria's and Vygotsky's idea to an Anglo-Saxon public. This, and a steady flow of books translated from the Russian ensured the gradual establishment of a solid Cultural Psychology base in the west. Another American scholar, James V. Wertsch, after completing his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1975, spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in Moscow to study linguistics and neuropsychology. Wertsch subsequently became one of the leading Western experts on Soviet Psychology. Principal among the groups promoting CHAT-related research is Yjrö Engeström's Helsinki-based CRADLE. In 1982 an Activity Conference, claimed to have been the first of its kind in Europe, organized by Yrjö Engeström to concentrate on teaching and learning issues, took place in Espoo (Fl), with the participation of experts from both Eastern and Western European countries. This was followed by the Aarhus (Dk) Conference in 1983 and the Utrecht (Nl) conference in 1984. In October 1986, West Berlin's College of Arts hosted the first ISCAR International Congress on Activity Theory. This was also the first effort to bring together under one roof researchers, theorists and philosophers working in the tradition of the Soviet psychologists Leontiev and Vygotsky. The second ISCRAT congress took place in Lahti, (Fl) in 1990. ISCRAT became a formal legal organization with its own by-laws in Amsterdam, 1992. Other ISCRAT conferences: Rome (1993), Moscow (1995), Aarhus (1998) and Amsterdam (2002), when ISCRAT and the Conference for Socio Cultural Research merged into ISCAR. From here on, ISCAR organizes an international Congress every three years: Sevilla (Es) 2005; San Diego (USA) 2008; Rome (It) 2011; Sydney (Au) 2014; Quebec, Canada (2017).

In more recent years the implications of activity theory in organizational development have been promoted by the work Yrjö Engeström's team at the Centre for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research (CATDWR) at the University of Helsinki, and Mike Cole at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) at the University of California San Diego campus.

In his 1987 "Learning by expanding", Engeström offers a very detailed account of the diverse sources, philosophical and psychological, that inform activity theory. In subsequent years, however, a simplified picture has emerged from his and other researchers' work, namely the idea that (to date) there are three principal 'stages' or 'generations' of activity theory, or "cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Whilst the first generation built on Vygotsky's notion of mediated action, from the individual's perspective, and the second generation built on Leont'ev's notion of activity system, with emphasis on the collective, the third generation, which appeared in the mid-nineties, builds on the idea of multiple interacting activity systems focused on a partially shared object, and boundary-crossings between them.

The first generation emerges from Vygotsky's theory of cultural mediation, which was a response to behaviorism's explanation of consciousness, or the development of the human mind, by reducing "mind" to a series of atomic components or structures associated primarily with the brain as "stimulus - response" (S-R) processes. Vygotsky argued that the relationship between a human subject and an object is never direct but must be sought in society and culture as they evolve historically, rather than in the human brain or individual mind unto itself. His cultural-historical psychology attempted to account for the social origins of language and thinking. To Vygotsky, consciousness emerges from human activity mediated by artifacts (tools) and signs.

This idea of semiotic mediation is embodied in Vygotsky's famous triangular model which features the Subject (S), Object (O), and Mediating Artifact triad: in mediated action the Subject, Object, and Artifact stand in a dialectical relationship whereby each affects the other and the activity as a whole. Vygotsky argues that the use of signs leads to a specific structure of human behavior, which breaks away from mere biological development allowing the creation of new forms of culturally-based psychological processes - hence the importance of (cultural-historical) context: individuals could no longer be understood without their cultural environment, nor society without the agency of the individuals who use and produced these artifacts. The objects became cultural entities, and action oriented towards the objects became the key to understanding the human psyche. In the Vygotskyan framework the unit of analysis, however, remains principally the individual. First-generation activity theory has been used to understand individual behavior by examining the ways in which a person's objectivized actions are culturally mediated. Besides a strong focus on material and symbolic mediation, internalization of external (social, societal, and cultural) forms of mediation, another important, aspect of first generation CHAT is the concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), meaning, as advanced in Mind in Society (1978), "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers". ZDP is one of the major legacies of Vygotsky's work in the social sciences.

While Vygotsky formulated practical human activity as the general explanatory category in human psychology, he did not fully clarify its precise nature. The second generation moves, beyond Vygotsky's individually-focused to A.N. Leontiev's collective model. In Engeström's now famous graphic depiction of second-generation activity, the unit of analysis has been expanded to include collective motivated activity toward an object, making room for understanding how collective action by social groups mediates activity. Hence the inclusion of community, rules, division of labor and the importance of analyzing their interactions with each other. Rules may be explicit or implicit. Division of labor refers to the explicit and implicit organization of the community involved in the activity. Engeström articulated the clearest distinction between classic Vygotskian psychology, which emphasizes the way semiotic and cultural systems mediate human action, and Leontiev's second-generation CHAT, which is focused on the mediational effects of the systemic organization of human activity.

In insisting that activity only exists in relation to rules, community and division of labor, Engeström expands the unit of analysis for studying human behavior from that of individual activity to a collective activity system. The collective activity system includes the social, psychological, cultural and institutional perspectives in the analysis. In this conceptualization context or activity systems are inherently related to what Engeström argues are the deep-seated material practices and socioeconomic structures of a given culture. These societal dimensions had not been taken sufficiently into account by Vygotsky's, earlier, more 'simple' triadic model: in Leontiev's understanding, thought and cognition should be understood as a part of social life - as a part of the means of production and systems of social relations on one hand, and the intentions of individuals in certain social conditions on the other.

In his famous example of the 'primeval collective hunt', Leontiev clarifies the crucial difference between an individual action ("the beater frightening game") and a collective activity ("the hunt"). While individuals' actions (frightening game) are different from the overall goal of the activity (hunt), they all share in the same motive (obtaining food). Operations, on the other hand, are driven by the conditions and tools at hand, i.e. the objective circumstances under which the hunt is taking place. To understand the separate actions of the individuals, one needs to understand the broader motive behind the activity as a whole: this accounts for the three hierarchical levels of human functioning: object-related motives drive the collective activity (top); goals drive individual/group action(s) (middle); conditions and tools drive automated operations (lower level).

After Vygotsky's foundational work on the individual's higher psychological functions and Leontiev's extension of these insights to collective activity systems, questions of diversity and dialogue between different traditions or perspectives became increasingly serious challenges, when, especially in the post-1990s, activity theory 'went international'. The work of Michael Cole and Yrjö Engeström in the 1970s and 1980s - mostly in parallel, but occasionally in collaboration - brought activity theory to a much wider audience of scholars in Scandinavia and North America. Once the lives and biographies of all the participants and the history of the wider community are taken into account, multiple activity systems need to be considered, positing, according to Engeström, the need for a "third generation" to " develop conceptual tools to understand dialogue, multiple perspectives, and networks of interacting activity Systems". This larger canvas of active individuals (and researchers) embedded in organizational, political, and discursive practices constitutes a tangible advantage of second- and third-generation CHAT over its earlier Vygotskian ancestor, which focused on mediated action in relative isolation Third-generation activity theory is the application of Activity Systems Analysis (ASA) in developmental research where investigators take a participatory and interventionist role in the participants' activities and change their experiences.

Engeström's now famous diagram, or basic activity triangle, - (which adds rules/norms, intersubjective community relations, and division of labor, as well as multiple activity systems sharing an object) - has become the principal third-generation model among the research community for analysing individuals and groups. Engeström summarizes the current state of CHAT with five principles:

1. The activity system as primary unit of analysis: the basic third-generation model includes minimally two interacting activity systems.

2. Multi-voicedness: an activity system is always a community of multiple points of views, traditions and interests.

3. Historicity: activity systems take shape and get transformed over long stretches of time. Potentials and problems can only be understood against the background of their own histories.

4. The central role of contradictions as sources of change and development.

5. Activity Systems' possibility for expansive transformation (cycles of qualitative transformation): when object and motive are reconceptualized a radically wider horizon opens up.

Most often, learning technologists have used third-generation CHAT as a guiding theoretical framework to understand how technologies are adopted, adapted, and configured through use in complex social situations.

From the 1960s onwards, starting in the global South, and independently from the mainstream European developmental line, Leontiev's core Objective Activity concept has been used in a Social Development context. In the Organization Workshop's Large Group Capacitation-method, objective/ized activity acts as the core causal principle which postulates that, in order to change the mind-set of (large groups of) individuals, we need to start with changes to their activity - and/or to the object that "suggests" their activity. In Leontievian vein, the Organization Workshop is all about semiotically-mediated activities through which (large groups of) participants learn how to manage themselves and the organizations they create to perform tasks that require a complex division of labor.

Especially over the last two decades, CHAT has offered a theoretical lens informing research and practice, in that it posits that learning takes place through collective activities that are purposefully conducted around a common object. Starting from the premise that learning is a social and cultural process that draws on historical achievements, its systems thinking-based perspectives allow insights into the real world.

Change Laboratory (CL) is a CHAT-based method for formative intervention in activity systems and for research on their developmental potential as well as processes of expansive learning, collaborative concept-formation, and transformation of practices, elaborated in the mid-nineties by the Finnish Developmental Work Research (DWR) group. The CL method relies on collaboration between the practitioners of the activity being analyzed and transformed, and academic researchers or interventionists supporting and facilitating collective developmental processes. On the basis of Engeström's theory of expansive learning, the foundation of an interventionist research approach at DWR was elaborated in the 1980s, and developed further in the 1990s as an intervention method now known as Change Laboratory. CL interventions are used both to study the conditions of change and to help those working in organizations to develop their work, drawing on participant observation, interviews, and the recording and videotaping of meetings and work practices. Initially, with the help of an external interventionist, the first stimulus that is beyond the actors' present capabilities, is produced in the Change Laboratory by collecting first-hand empirical data on problematic aspects of the activity. This data may comprise difficult client cases, descriptions of recurrent disturbances and ruptures in the process of producing the outcome. Steps in the CL process: Step 1 Questioning; Step 2 Analysis; Step 3 Modeling; Step 4 Examining; Step 5 Implementing; Step 6 Reflecting; Step 7 Consolidating. These seven action steps for increased understanding are described by Engeström as expansive learning, or phases of an outwardly expanding spiral, while multiple kinds of actions can take place at any time. The phases of the model simply allow for the identification and analysis of the dominant action type during a particular period of time. These learning actions are provoked by contradictions. CL is used by a team or work unit or by collaborating partners across the organizational boundaries, initially with the help of an interventionist-researcher. The CL method has been used in agricultural contexts, educational and media settings, health care and learning support.

Activity systems analysis is a CHAT-based method, discussed in Engeström 1987/ Engeström 1993 and in Cole & Engeström, 1993, for understanding human activity in real-world situations with data collection, analysis, and presentation methods that address the complexities of human activity in natural settings aimed to advance both theory and practice. It is based on Vygotsky's concept of mediated action and captures human activity in a triangle model that includes the subject, tool, object, rule, community, and division of labor. Subjects are participants in an activity, motivated toward a purpose or attainment of the object. The object can be the goal of an activity, the subject's motives for participating in an activity, and the material products that subjects gain through an activity. Tools are socially shared cognitive and/or material resources that subjects can use to attain the object. Informal or formal rules regulate the subject's participation while engaging in an activity. The community is the group or organization to which subjects belong. The division of labor is the shared participation responsibilities in the activity determined by the community. Finally, the outcome is the consequences that the subject faces because of his/her actions driven by the object. These outcomes can encourage or hinder the subject's participation in future activities. In Part 2 of her video " Using Activity Theory to understand human behaviour", van der Riet 2010 shows how activity theory is applied to the problem of behavior change and HIV and AIDs (in South Africa). The video focuses on sexual activity as the activity of the system, and illustrates how an Activity System Analysis, through a historical and current account of the activity, provides a way of understanding lack of behavior change in response to HIV and AIDS. In her eponymous book "Activity Systems Analysis Methods.", Yamagata-Lynch 2010, p. 37ss describes seven ASA case studies which fall "into four distinct work clusters. These clusters include works that help (a) understand developmental work research (DWR), (b) describe real-world learning situations, (c) design human computer interaction systems, and (d) plan solutions to complicated work-based problems". Other uses of ASA: Summarizing organizational change; Identifying guidelines for designing Constructivist Learning Environments; Identifying contradictions and tensions that shape developments in educational settings; Demonstrating historical developments in organizational learning., and Evaluating K-12 school and university partnership relations.

When HCI first appeared on the scene as a separate field of study in the early 1980s, HCI adopted the information processing paradigm of computer science as the model for human cognition, predicated on prevalent cognitive psychology criteria, which, it was soon realized, failed to account for individuals' interests, needs and frustrations involved, nor of the fact that the technology critically depends on complex, meaningful, social, and dynamic contexts in which it takes place. Adopting a CHAT theoretical perspective had important implications for understanding how people use interactive technologies: the realization, for example, that a computer is typically an object of activity rather than a mediating artefact means that people interact with the world through computers, rather than with computer 'objects'. A number of diverse methodologies outlining techniques for human-computer interaction design have emerged since the rise of the field in the 1980s. Most design methodologies stem from a model for how users, designers, and technical systems interact. Bonnie Nardi produced the - hitherto - most applicable collection of activity theoretical HCI literature.

SSAT builds on the general theory of activity to provide an effective basis for both experimental and analytic methods of studying human performance, using carefully developed units of analysis SSAT approaches cognition both as a process and as a structured system of actions or other functional information-processing units, developing a taxonomy of human activity through the use of structurally organized units of analysis. The systemic-structural approach to activity design and analysis involves identifying the available means of work, tools and objects; their relationship with possible strategies of work activity; existing constraints on activity performance; social norms and rules; possible stages of object transformation; and changes in the structure of activity during skills acquisition.This method is demonstrated by applying it to the study of a human-computer interaction task.

The strengths of CHAT are grounded both in its long historical roots and extensive contemporary use: it offers a philosophical and cross-disciplinary perspective for analyzing diverse human practices as development processes in which both individual and social levels are interlinked, as well as interactions and boundary-crossings. between activity systems More recently, the focus of studies of organizational learning has increasingly shifted away from learning within single organizations or organizational units, towards learning in multi‐organizational or inter‐organizational networks, as well as to the exploration and better understanding of interactions in their social context, multiple contexts and cultures, and the dynamics and development of particular activities. This shift has generated, among others, such concepts as "networks of learning" and " networked learning", coworking, and knotworking. Industry of late has seen strong growth in nonemployer firms (NEFs), thanks to changes in long-term employment trends and developments in mobile technology which have led to more work from remote locations, more distance collaboration, and more work organized around temporary projects. Developments such as these and new forms of social production or commons-based peer production, such as e.g. open source development and cultural production in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, have become a key focus in Engeström's more recent work.

"Fourth generation"

The rapid rise of new forms of activities characterised by web-based social and participatory practices, , phenomena such as distributed workforce and the dominance of knowledge work, prompts a rethink of the third-generation model, bringing with it the need, as suggested by Engestrōm, for a new, fourth generation activity system model. which activity theorists indeed have been working on in recent years. In fourth generation CHAT, the object(ive) will typically comprise multiple perspectives and contexts and be inherently transient; collaborations between actors, too, are likely to be temporary, with multiple boundary crossings between interrelated activities. Fourth-generation activity theorists have specifically developed activity theory to better accommodate Castells's (and others') insights into how work organization has shifted in the network society: they hence will focus less on the workings of individual activity systems (often represented by triangles) and more on the interactions across activity systems functioning in networks. The 2017 ISCAR congress (August, Quebec City) has the following theme: '' Taking a 360° view of the landscape of cultural-historical activity research:The state of our scholarship in practice.

Andersson, Gavin; Richards, Howard (2012). "Bounded and Unbounded Organization". Africanus. 42 (1): 98-119.ISSN 0304-615X

Blunden, Andy (2009). Soviet Cultural Psychology. Archived from the original on 8 July 2015.

Carmen, Raff; Sobrado, Miguel (2000). A Future for the Excluded. London, UK: Zed Books. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.695.1688. ISBN 9781856497022.

Cole, Michael (1996). Cultural Psychology. A Once and Future Discipline. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. 37. Harvard University Press Harvard MA. pp. 279-335. ISBN 978-0-674-17951-6. PMID 2485856.

CRADLE, (Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning) (2009). Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. Finland: University of Helsinki. Archived from the original on 26 January 2015..

Daniels, Harry; Edwards, Anne; Engeström, Yrjö; Gallagher, Tony; Ludvigsen, Sten (2010). Activity Theory in Practice. Promoting learning across boundaries and agencies. Routledge London. ISBN 978-0-415-47725-3. OCLC 244057445.

Engeström, Yrjö (1993). Developmental studies of work as a testbench of activity theory: The case of primary care medical practice. In: S. Chaiklin & J. Lave (Eds.), Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context. (pp. 64-103). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Engeström, Yrjö (2001). "Expansive Learning at Work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization" (PDF). Journal of Education and Work. Journal of Education and Work, Vol 14, No 1. 14: 133-156. doi:10.1080/13639080020028747.

Engeström, Yrjö (2005). "Knotworking to Create Collaborative Intentionality Capital in Fluid Organizational Fields". Knotworking to create collaborative capital in fluid organizational fields. Advances in Interdisciplinary Studies of Work Teams. 11. Elsevier Advances in Interdisciplinary Studies of Work Teams Volume 11, 307-336. pp. 307-336. doi:10.1016/S1572-0977(05)11011-5. ISBN 978-0-7623-1222-1. ISSN 1572-0977.

Engeström, Yrjö (2007). Putting Vygotsky to work: the Change Laboratory as an application of double stimulation in: S. Daniels, M. Cole & J.V.Wertsch (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky. (pp. 363-382). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Engeström, Yrjö; Sannino, Analisa (2009). "Studies of expansive learning: Foundations, findings and future challenges" (PDF). Educational Research Review. 5: 1-24. doi:10.1016/j.edurev.2009.12.002.

- Chapter 25 in: Yogesh K. Dwivedi, Y.K. Lal, B., Williams, M., Schneberger, S.L., Wade, M., 2009, Handbook of Research on Contemporary Theoretical Models in Information Systems, IGI Global, 2009, ISBN 9781605666594

Kaptelinin, Victor; Nardi, Bonnie A. Activity theory: basic concepts and applications. online ACM New York, NY, USA 1997.

Labra, Iván (1992). Psicología Social: Responsabilidad y Necesidad - Social Psychology. Responsibility and Need (in Spanish). LOM Ediciones, Chile. ISBN 978-9567369522.

Leontiev, Aleksei Nikolaevich (1977). Activity and Consciousness (PDF). P.O. Box 1541; Pacifica, CA 94044; USA.: Marxist Internet Archive (2009). ISBN 978-0-9805428-3-7.

Leontiev, Aleksei N (1978). Activity, Consciousness, and Personality. Prentice-Hall - Translated by Marie J. Hall. OCLC 3770804.

in: Wertsch 1981, p. 37-78

Leontiev, Aleksei Nikolaevich (1981). The Development of Mind - Selected Works of A.N. Leontyev - Foreword M.Cole (PDF). P.O. Box 1541; Pacifica, CA 94044; USA.: Marxist Internet Archive (2009). ISBN 978-0-9805428-3-7.

Luria, A.R. (1976). The Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-13731-8.

Morais, Clodomir, Santos de (1979). Apuntes de teoría de la organización - Notes on theory of Organization (in Spanish). Managua, Nicaragua: PNUD, OIT-NIC/79/010, COPERA Project.

Nardi, B.A., ed. (1996). Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.USA. ISBN 978-0262140584. Nardi, B.A. (ed.), Context andConsciousness: Activity Theory and Human-.

Roth, Wolff-Michael; Lee, Yew-Lin (2007). ""Vygotsky's Neglected Legacy": Cultural-Historical Activity Theory". Review of Educational Research. 77 (2): 186-232. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.584.7175. doi:10.3102/0034654306298273.

Roth, Wolff Michael; Radford, Luis; Lacroix, Lionel (2012). "Working With Cultural-Historical Activity Theory". Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research. 13 (2).

Sannino, Annalisa; Daniels, Harry; Gutiérrez, Kris D. (2009). Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory (PDF). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521758109.

Spinuzzi, Clay (2012). "Working Alone Together: Coworking as Emergent Collaborative Activity". Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 26 (4): 399-441. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.679.2427. doi:10.1177/1050651912444070.

Spinuzzi, Clay (2014). "How Nonemployer Firms Stage-Manage Ad Hoc Collaboration: An Activity Theory Analysis". Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 8 (2): 63-93. doi:10.1080/10572252.2013.797334. hdl:.

Spinuzzi, Clay (2018). "From Superhumans to Supermediators: Locating the extraordinary in CHAT". In Yasnitsky, Anton (ed.). Questioning Vygotsky's Legacy: Scientific Psychology or Heroic Cult. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 131-160. doi:10.4324/9781351060639. ISBN 9781351060639.

UNESCO, ibedata (1979). Terminology of Adult Education (trilingual en-es-fr). Paris, Fr.: UNESCO. ISBN 978-9230016838.

Yamagata-Lynch, Lisa C. (2007). "Confronting Analytical Dilemmas for Understanding Complex Human Interactions in Design-Based Research from a Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) Framework". Journal of the Learning Sciences. 16 (4): 451-484. doi:10.1080/10508400701524777.

Yamazumi, K (17 August 2009). Expansive Agency in Multi-Activity Collaboration. in:Sannino, Daniels & Gutiérrez 2009, p. 212. ISBN 9780521760751.

1. ^ Nardi 1996, p. 7 notes that activity theory is a "a research framework and set of perspectives", not a hard and fast methodology or strongly predictive single theory.

2. ^ Roth & Lee 2007, p. 192: "CHAT was conceived of as a concrete psychology immersed in everyday praxis": "consciousness is located in everyday practice: you are what you do" Nardi 1996, p. 7

3. It is well known that the Soviet philosopher of psychology ^ S.L.Rubinshtein, independently of Vygotsky's work, developed his own variant of activity as a philosophical and psychological theory. re: V. Lektorsky in Engeström, Miettinen & Punamäki 1999, p. 66;Brushlinskii, A. V. 2004 Archived 1 September 2014 at Archive.today. Engeström would be happy to also include [in the account of A.T.] reference to Luria, Zinchenko (father, Peter, and son, Vladimir), Elkonin, Davydov and Brushlinsky (as well as to various other figures who have influenced activity-theory in the West, such as Dewey, Mead, and Wittgenstein). Bakhurst 2009, p. 201

4. Political restrictions in its country of origin (Stalinist Russia) had suppressed the cultural-historical psychology - also known as the Vygotsky School - in the mid-thirties. This meant that the core "^ activity" concept remained confined to the field of psychology, although Blunden 2011, in "An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity", argues that it has the potential to evolve as a genuinely interdisciplinary concept. See also Nussbaumer 2012, p. 37

5. CHAT explicitly incorporates the mediation of activities by ^ society, which means that it can be used to link concerns normally independently examined by sociologists of education and (social) psychologists. Roth & Lee 2007 and Roth, Radford & Lacroix 2012

6. The activity theoretical framework, as recently as the 1990s, was still referred to as "^ one of the best kept secrets of academia" Engeström 1993, p. 64; Roth & Lee 2007, p. 188

7. In particular Goethe's ^ romantic science Archived 3 October 2015 at the Wayback Machine ideas which were later taken up by Hegel. The meaning of "activity" in the conceptual sense is rooted in the German word Tätigkeit. Hegel is considered the first philosopher to point out that the development of humans' knowledge is not spiritually given, but developed in history from living and working in natural environments.

8. ^ Fraser, J.; Yasnitsky, A. (2015). "Deconstructing Vygotsky's Victimization Narrative: A Re-Examination of the "Stalinist Suppression" of Vygotskian Theory" (PDF). History of the Human Sciences. 28: 128-153. doi:10.1177/0952695114560200.

9. Other notable CHAT specialists: ^ Jaan Valsiner (Estonian - Clark University), René van der Veer (Dutch - Leiden University) and Dorothy (Dot) Robbins Archived 10 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine (German- University of Central Missouri)

10. Other CHAT-based centers of research and learning: ^ Oxford Center for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research Archived 5 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine (OSAT), International Society o Cultural and Activity Research(ISCAR), LCSD: Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC), Kansai University (Japan) CHAT: Center for Activity Theory Archived 28 July 2017 at the Wayback Machine. BERA British Educational Research Association (CHAT Special Interest Group).

11. (Selective) list of other CHAT-related research groups and centers: ^ ATUL Archived 14 February 2017 at the Wayback Machine (Activity Theory Usability Laboratory at the University of Wollongong Australia - "Organisations and communities of the Knowledge Age"). ; CHAT Archived 28 July 2017 at the Wayback Machine (Center for Human Activity Theory, Kansai University, Japan - "Links with Helsinki, Bath and California"). ; OSAT Archived 5 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine (Oxford Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research at Oxford University UK. - "Learning across the age range".) ; LIW (Learning in and for Interagency Working at the University of Bath, UK - "Effective multiagency working".

12. ^ Yamagata-Lynch, Lisa C.; Haudenschild, Michael T. (2009). "Using activity systems analysis to identify inner contradictions in teacher professional development". Teaching and Teacher Education. 25 (3): 507-517. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2008.09.014.; Engeström, 2008, "The Future of Activity Theory" p. 6.

13. Vygotsky makes the point that ^ "man himself determines his behavior with the help of an artificially created stimulus means." (as cited by Norris Minick in Vol I of "The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky", 1987, PLENUM - New York/London, p.21);

14. ^ Mediation is perhaps the key theoretical idea behind activity: we don't just use tools and symbol systems; instead, our everyday lived experience is significantly mediated and intermediated by our use of tools and symbols systems. Activity theory helps frame, therefore, our understanding of such mediation.

15. While the ^ unit of analysis, for Vygotsky, is "individual activity" and, for Leontiev, the "collective activity system", for Jean Lave and others working around situated cognition the unit of analysis is "practice", "community of practice", and "participation". Other scholars analyze "the relationships between the individual's psychological development and the development of social systems". re: Minick in Cole, Engeström & Vasquez 1997, p. 125; Lave & Wenger 1991

16. In the second generation diagram, activity is positioned in the middle, mediation at the top, adding rules, community and division of labor at the bottom. The minimum components of an ^ activity system are: the subject; the object; outcome; mediating instruments/tools/artifacts; rules and signs; community and division of labor.

17. ^ Hardman 2007 Introduction: "A flurry of recent publications indicates that Activity Theory is proving a useful tool for studying work setting" She mentions, among others, Product design, Collaborative activity, Studies in creativity, Educational interventions. Although not as widely known in the US, Kirsten Foot mentions use of CHAT in Educational curricula development, Mental health care, Organizational processes and Public policy.

18. From the original ^ Предметная деятельность(Russian) (predmetnaja-dejatelnost) and Gegenständliche Tätigkeit(German), commonly translated as"Actividad Objetivada"(Spanish) - see: Leontiev 1984, p. 66, and as Objective Activity in English: e.g. Chapter 3 of Leontiev 1978, p. 50ss, Wertsch 1981, p. 46ss and Miettinen 2005 Abstract:'Leontiev's concept of practice or Objective Activity'. (For "Objectivis/zed", see e.g.: Leontiev 1978, p. 116: "Activity's secondary objectivised existence" and Leontiev 1977, p. 404: "the mental image objectivised in its product"). "Objectivized Activity" is perceived to be closer to both the letter and the spirit of dynamic, interactive, dialectical weighting of Leontiev's original predmetnaya dyaetel'nost.

19. ^ "Laboratories on Objectivized Activity" in: Labra & Labra 2012; Labra 1992: "Actividad Objetivada"(Spanish) p. 53; "de Morais' antecedent thought on Objectivised Activity" in Andersson 2004, p. 221 ss; Carmen & Sobrado 2000, p. 118 & note No. 2.

20. ^ Andersson 2013, p. 5ss (Pre booklaunch chapter from "Unbounded Organization: Embracing the Societal Enterprise").

21. Sannino, 2008 ^ "From Talk to Action: Experiencing Interlocution in Developmental Interventions" Sannino sees in Yves Clot's Vygotsky-inspired Clinic of Activity (Clinique de l'Activité) a potentially complementary - (to CL, that is) - intervention method. (See also Clot, Yves, 2009 Clinic of Activity: The Dialogue as Instrument in Sannino, Daniels & Gutiérrez 2009).

22. Expansive learning is described by ^ Engeström 2009a, p. 130 as a process which "begins with individual subjects questioning accepted practices, and it gradually expands into a collective movement or institution. - The theory enables a "longitudinal and rich analysis of inter-organizational learning [] by using observational as well as interventionist designs in studies of work and organization". (Engeström & Kerosuo, 2007)

23. ^ Jonassen, David H.; Rohrer-Murphy, Lucia (1999). "Activity theory as a framework for designing constructivist learning environments". Educational Technology Research and Development. 47 (1): 61-79. doi:10.1007/BF02299477.

24. ^ Yamagata-Lynch, Lisa C. (2003). "Using Activity Theory as an Analytic Lens for Examining Technology Professional Development in Schools". Mind, Culture, and Activity. 10 (2): 100-119. doi:10.1207/S1532-7884MCA1002_2.

25. ^ Yamagata-Lynch, Lisa C.; Smaldino, Sharon (2007). "Using activity theory to evaluate and improve K-12 school and university partnerships". Evaluation and Program Planning. 30 (4): 364-380. doi:10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2007.08.003. PMID 17881055. - For ASA and (computer-based) mathematics education see e.g. Hardman 2007

26. ^ Bedny, G.; Karwowski, W. (2003). "A Systemic-Structural Activity Approach to the Design of Human-Computer Interaction Tasks". International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 16 (2): 235-260. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.151.8384. doi:10.1207/s15327590ijhc1602_06.

27. ^ Bedny, Karwowski & Bedny 2014; Bedny, I. S.; Karwowski, W.; Bedny, G. Z. (2010). "A Method of Human Reliability Assessment Based on Systemic-Structural Activity Theory". International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 26 (4): 377-402. doi:10.1080/10447310903575507.; Bedny & Karwowski 2006;

28. see e.g. Spinuzzi, 2010: shift from bureaucracies (1970s), to adhocracies (1990s), to all-edge adhocracies (2010s), in: ^ "All Edge: Understanding the New Workplace Networks".

29. By 2008, Engeström's examples become 'less bounded': ^ runaway objects - or 'partially shared large-scale objects in complex, distributed multi-activity fields'-, wildfire, and mycorrhizae-like activities, are examples of this shift. (Engeström 2009b; Engeström in Sannino, Daniels & Gutiérrez 2009, p. 310; Spinuzzi 2011).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cultural-historical activity theory ( CHAT) is a theoretical framework which helps to understand and analyse the relationship between the human mind (what people think and feel) and activity (what people do). It traces its origins to the founders of the cultural-historical school of Russian psychology L. S. Vygotsky and Aleksei N.

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Principles originally put forward by Lev Vygotsky in Thought and Language (1986), looking for new approaches to psychology.

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In Activity Theory people (actors) use external tools (e.g. hammer, computer, car) and internal tools (e.g. plans, cognitive maps) to achieve their goals.

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contributed by Steve Wheeler, Associate Professor, Plymouth Institute of Education

This is number 8 in my series on learning theories. My intention is to work through the alphabet of psychologists and provide a brief overview of each theory, and how it can be applied in education. In the last post we examined the various educational theories of John Dewey including experiential learning.

In this post, we explore the work of Yrjö Engeström on Activity Theory. This is a simplified interpretation of the theory, so if you wish to learn more, please refer to the original work of the theorist. Activity Theory (AT) originated in Soviet Russia from the work of Vygotsky and Leont'ev on Cultural Historical psychology and Rubenstein and others on related neuropsychological perspectives.

It is a complex theory which draws on a number of disciplines and it has far reaching implications for education. The Scandinavian school of thought that has developed around Activity Theory is arguably the most referred to in the literature and is largely based on the work of Yrjö Engeström.
How The Activity Learning Theory Works
Vygotsky's earlier concept of mediation, which encompassed learning alongside others (Zone of Proximal Development) and through interaction with artifacts, was the basis for Engeström's version of Activity Theory (known as Scandinavian Activity Theory). Engeström's approach was to explain human thought processes not simply on the basis of the individual, but in the wider context of the individual's interactions within the social world through artifacts, and specifically in situations where activities were being produced.

In Activity Theory people (actors) use external tools (e.g. hammer, computer, car) and internal tools (e.g. plans, cognitive maps) to achieve their goals. In the social world there are many artifacts, which are seen not only as objects, but also as things that are embedded within culture, with the result that every object has cultural and/or social significance.

Tools (which can limit or enable) can also be brought to bear on the mediation of social interaction, and they influence both the behavior of the actors (those who use the tools) and also the social structure within which the actors exist (the environment, tools, artifacts). For further reading, here is Engeström's own overview of 3 Generations of Activity Theory development. The first figure shows Second Generation AT as it is usually presented in the literature.

The first figure is my interpretation in relation to digital presence, community and identity, while the latter is based on Engeström's work.
How It Can Be Applied In Education
Teachers should be aware that everything in the classroom has a cultural and social meaning. The way children interact with each other and with the teacher will be mediated (influenced) by objects such as the whiteboard, furniture, technology, and even the shape, size and configuration of the room. This also includes its ambient characteristics such as lighting and noise levels. Learning occurs within these contexts, and usually through specific activities.

Teachers should ensure that those activities are relevant and iterative, providing students with incremental challenges that they can engage with at a social level, so that the entire community of learners extends its collective knowledge through the construction of meaning. Teachers should also be aware that tools can limit as well as enable social interaction, so must be applied wisely and appropriately to promote the most effective learning.
Reference
Engeström, Y., Mietinnen, R. and Punamäki, R-L. (Eds: 1999) Perspectives on Activity Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Previous posts in this series:
Anderson ACT-R Cognitive Architecture
Argyris Double Loop Learning
Bandura Social Learning Theory
Bruner Scaffolding Theory
Craik and Lockhart Levels of Processing
Csíkszentmihályi Flow Theory
Dewey Experiential Learning
This post first appeared on Steve's personal blog; How The Activity Learning Theory Works; Graphic by Steve Wheeler

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
contributed by Steve Wheeler , Associate Professor, Plymouth Institute of Education This is number 8 in my series on learning theories. My intention is to work through the alphabet of psychologists and provide a brief overview of each theory, and how it can be applied in education.