Reflective learning in physical education with a multicodal online video tool

Thomas Bernhard Seiler, a Swiss philosopher and psychologist, has been working on the concept of knowledge for several decades. Referring to Jean Piaget he proposes a genetic structure understanding of knowledge which discriminates between personal and public knowledge. Personal knowledge is divided into conceptual, intuitive-iconic and embodied acting knowledge; it is dialectically connected to public knowledge which means conventionalized knowledge in the form of information and data (Seiler, 2008). This theory frames the speech and concentrates on the potential of an online video tool in physical education. This tool (name: edubreak-sports) not only allows to videotape own movements but to annotate words, audio and pictures online and to discuss critical movement incidents with others. I want to argue that you can interpret the resulting mental processes by using this interactive and collaborative technology as knowledge transformation (Sporer, 2007). The article demonstrates how to support constructing knowledge and reflecting upon it (Cassidy, Stanley & Bartlett, 2006) in order to foster a “reflective practitioner” (Schön, 1983). The focus is on two perspectives (Salomon & Perkins, 1998):

The perspective of i n d i v i d u a l cognition is the focus when the user stops the video on personally important points and makes muticodal comments. The learner thereby interprets the movements within constraints referring to the chosen code (syntactic), the underlying content (semantic) and the existing cultural context (pragmatic). This is a form of “semiotic act” (Seiler)which means to attribute symbols to movement incidents or situations. The perspective of s o c i a l p a r t i c i p at i o n is the focus when the learner makes these contributions in a virtual community where he shares his comments with others. As a result all participants contribute to the development of a “knowledge thesaurus” through which the individual and social perspective is intertwined dialectical. First studies in courses of trainer education was applied provide promising findings in this direction.