Interactivity, Learning, and Creativity: From Interaction to Co-Action in Higher Education

The chapter by Steffensen and colleagues is an empirically based theoretical contribution to the fields of interactivity, embodied cognition, and interaction studies. It takes a starting point in an ecological view, according to which cognition is traced to the coordinative dynamics in human organism-environment systems. The chapter takes as its starting point the understanding of interactivity as sense-saturated coordination in human organism-environment systems, and hence as the basis of such theory-laden distinctions between interaction, cognition, and learning. Further, it exemplifies how the study of interactivity can be pursued by using the method of Cognitive Event Analysis. The chapter also analyses an example from an informal learning context in which two participants co-act to develop a data structure for a web application. The chapter starts with a discussion of the cognitive models embedded in current thinking on learning and higher education. It then gives a historical introduction to the concept of interactivity in Human-Computer Interaction, cognitive psychology, and dynamical systems theory, before the theoretical position advanced in this article is presented. After a short interlude, in which the method of Cognitive Event Analysis is presented, the authors provide a detailed analysis of how the two participants in the distributed cognitive system identify a specific problem in the data structure (the need for user identification) and reach a decision on how to handle it. The dynamics of the cognitive trajectory are traced to embodied resources, including the timing of gesture and speech and misunderstandings in reference.