This report first set out to investigate the domain of interactive television, searching for possibilities in implementing e-learning systems on this particular platform. This investigation is undertaken by several interviews with Danish distributors of digital broadcasting signals that carry possibilities for the interactive part. We soon find out that e-learning based on particular technologies is a wrong or poor point of departure. Instead we are encouraged to take another entry point – namely the content for context approach.
In our search of conceptual means for describing the context surrounding IS development and the domain for intervention we deploy activity theory as Yrjö Engeström has interpreted it. Taking departure in his work ‘Learning by Expanding: An Activity - Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research’ we aim our investigations toward three case-studies, with the specific intentions of finding indicators of occurrences of learning actions. What makes activities develop themselves into more advanced activities than they were before?
The three cases comprises each different elements of the context made accessible by the conceptual means given by activity theory. The first case is based on empirical material concerning ‘Post Danmark’s use of an e-learning system based on simulating the users daily work activities. The second case concerns the transition of the central activity of the municipality of Aalborg by introducing a new computer based artefact into the activity. The third and last case concerns the developmental process of making an e-learning system with intentions of learning immigrants and refugees the Danish language.
Our results comprise a set of advice to other researchers and in particular the producers of interactive television programs. We find that by taking this step from developing regular television programs to interactive programs these TV-producers may require instruments different from their regular ones, which still are widely deployed in development phases. The consequence of deploying these instruments only, is evident in the success rate of interactive programs during the last three or four years. Especially evident is the case of TDC, which is a large telecommunications company in Denmark. They started out with huge investments in this period with no return value why they have made a drastically drawback from the marked.