Key ideas

• support
• scaffolding
• scripting
• orchestration

Parent-child or teacher-sudent interactions. Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (but he never used the term scaffolding himself).

“adult controlling those elements of the task that are essentially beyond the learner’s capacity, thus permitting him to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within his range of competence” (Wood, Bruner and Ross 1976)

Scaffold as building implement has five functions:

• provides a support
• functions as a tool
• extends the range of the worker
• allows a worker to accomplish a task not otherwise possible
• is used to selectively aid the worker where needed (Greenfield 1999)

This implies that scaffold can be taken away when no longer needed, but also means that child is back on the bottom level again? Arch being supported by temporary structure while being built is a better metaphor.

• paper-and-pencil tools
• technology resources
• peer-support
• teacher-led discussions

Wood documented six kinds of support:

• recruiting the child’s interest
• reducing the degrees of freedom by simplifying the task
• maintaining direction
• highlighting the critical task features
• controlling frustration
• demonstrating ideal solution paths

Domain expert and facilitator:

• perceptual
• cognitive
• affective components (Stone 1998)

Shared understanding of the goal of the activity is central to successful scaffolding. This helps provide motivation for the child to complete the task.

Adult provides appropriate support based on ongoing diagnosis of child's current level of understanding. Needs:

• thorough understanding of task and its components
• knowledge of child's capabilities as they develop

thus the amount and type of strategies are not only different for different learners, but also for the same learner over time.

Dialogue is crucial for ongoing assessment of student, and allowing students to play a role in negotiating interactions.

Fading support, so learner is in control and taking responsibility for the learning.

What's important about transfer of responsibility: child has not only learnt to do a specific task, but has abstracted the process of completing activity, able to generalize to other similar tasks.

Classroom situations don't allow for fine-tuned, sensitive, personalized exchange (Rogoff, 1990) - support moves to being provided by paper, software tool or classroom activities are redefined so peers can scaffold each other.

Loose the adaptability, and end up with “blanket scaffolding”, which is never faded.

One possibility is fading by a “stop reminding me button” (Jackson et all 1998). Also possible to use learner model (Ecolab - Luckin 1998).

• procedural (provided by tool?)
• conceptual (provided by teacher?)

• reflective
• intrinsic
• supportive (specific help to complete a task)
• task-focused (Jackson et all 1998)

How is procedural scaffolding different from scripting? Or isn't it?

domain expert / facilitator, domain-dependent/independent paper tools

comparison of peer-scaffolding and expert-scaffolding (Rogoff 1990)

To what extent is this idealized notion of scaffolding, helping learners reach their ZPD etc, based on an “encyclopedic” epistemology? Seems to fit well in science, but what about social science and humanities? I guess it is possible to scaffold a certain way of interacting with ideas, rather than exactly what those ideas will be - a skill/appreciation, rather than understanding/knowledge? p. 28

“Bubbling up” great ideas from small groups to the whole group - or in our case, to the larger community/network. This is the kind of stuff that could be done automatically with Web 2.0 tools. In general, interesting to see relationship between small groups and whole group. p. 29 sponges

link to Skinner Interesting point about scaffolds in KB, does this mean that they should eventually be removed? And does it mean that for example experts would _not_ be served well by these kinds of scaffolds? p. 10

KB scaffolds actually serve as a second purpose, apart from cognitive “nudges” - they are semantic markers, enabling future analyses, and something that in fact we would like scientists to use in their papers, to enable richer computer analysis, visualizations etc p. 10