Fostering Teacher-Student Interaction and Learner Autonomy by the I-TUTOR Maps

Abstract

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