[quoting Bates, 16 Nov 95] I think interactivity could be considered at two levels: surface and deep. Surface interactivity is predominantly associated with navigation whereas deep interactivity engages the user in what you describe as learning engagement.
This comment has helped throw me out of pondering and into spewing forth this stream-of-consciousness set of concerns crossing several recent topics. Thanks to Rod and all for stimulating conversation:
The first issue I've been puzzling over is just this issue of levels. In what I call "task-oriented" interactions, which is mostly what the field of HCI is concerned with (where you want to minimize the cognitive overhead to accomplish a task as opposed to learning interactions where you deliberately want a cognitive challenge aimed carefully at the ZOPD), they distinguish between different levels of linguistic analysis of dialogues or interactions: syntactic, semantic, etc. (Sorry, I'm in my "work" office, not my academic environs, so I can't pull the references off the shelf.)
My concern here is that the categories of interactivity are confounding several levels: at a low level is the question of differentiating between clicking and dragging, at a higher level the distinction is between filling out forms versus executing commands, and ultimately we have the choice of knowledge browsing versus experimentation versus explicit model construction. I haven't been able to convince myself that this discussion doesn't cut across levels. I realize Rod is not talking about just clicking versus dragging, but I begin to believe you can almost implement any high-level activity in any interaction modality.
When I consider
I note that it's not clear to me where model-building fits. I think the extreme end of constructivism is students using knowledge representation tools (from hypermedia databases, through dynamic modeling tools, to programming languages) to explicitly model their understanding. I don't see a category that qualifies, yet I believe it's important.
As an aside, I'd like to criticize the difference between "non-immersive" and "immersive." To me, the cognitive immersion takes place whether or not there's physical immersion. I don't think kids playing Doom are really any less "inside" that world just because they don't have headsets on. They ARE in that world. Unless it means whether it's a first-person versus a third-person view.
I'm also concerned with the setting. Take, for example, reflective interactivity. One of the most intriguing ways I've seen to generate reflection through Rod's mechanism of comparing responses, is for students to, post-hoc, examine a trace of their activities through the learning environment. How does this fit in the picture? It seems that part of this depends on the context in which the activity happens, so it's hard to construe the interactivity alone.
Consider: Rob Phillips touts his muscle simulation hypermedia system, but what motivates the further exploration of this system? We know that browsing hypermedia databases doesn't lead to learning without some overarching goal around which to organize the information integration. Liz Tancred's Brainstorm project is a lovely multiple representation of neuroanatomy, but it's a pretty toy until it's embedded in tutorial activities with goals. If the motivation is external to the program, how does that affect the interactivity?
Which brings up one other issue--that of games. I think the power of a game is that it provides a thematically coherent motivation for experimenting to discover the underlying rules. Of course, the definition of an activity as a game is in the mind of the player, and the boundary between simulation and game is hardly clear. If Tom's simulation was set in context, it would be up to the users to determine whether it was a game or not (for some, flight simulators are training, for others it's gaming).
Well, I'll leave off on these discursive ramblings. I think Rod's raised an important issue, and he's to be congratulated for tackling this difficult issue of categorizing interactivity, and suggest that one way to view it is as different forms of "cognitive engagement with learning tasks" or somesuch. I think we can all benefit from grappling with this issue.