Looking THROUGH versus Looking AT: A Strong Concept in Technology Enhanced Learning

When watching an educational video, our eyes look for relevant information related to the topic that is being explained at that particular moment. Studying the learners’ gaze behavior and particularly how it correlates with their performance, we have found a series of results, which converge to an understanding about learner behavior that is more abstracted than the use situation or the studied learning contexts. In this contribution we present “Looking Through vs. Looking At” as a generative intermediate-level body of knowledge, and show how it can construct a Strong Concept (as developed by Höök [10]) in technology enhanced learning (TEL). “Looking At”, simply put, refers to missing the relevant information because of either looking at the incorrect place or lagging behind the teacher in time. “Looking Through”, on the other hand, is the success in finding the relevant displayed information at the right moment such that the communication, through verbal and visual channels, becomes synchronous. The visual medium becomes transparent and the learning experience shifts from interacting with the material to interacting with the teacher. We define formally and show how to quantify the proposed strong concept in dyadic interaction scenarios. This concept is applicable to MOOC video interaction, but also to other learning scenarios such as (collaborative) problem solving. We put a particular emphasis on the generative aspect of the concept and demonstrate, with examples, how it can help designing solutions for interactive learning situations.