'discussion'
Brook, C. and Oliver, R. (2003). Online learning communities: Investigating a design framework. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 19(2), 139-160. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet19/brook.html
Begins with a quick overview of some of the benefits of collaboration and community interaction in learning:
- increased motivation
- promoting learning achievement
- enhanced perception of (and satisfaction with) skill development
- nurturing, socialisation & support
“modern societies tending to develop more relational communities… or communities of the mind”
“a learning community is characterised by a willingness of members to share resources, accept and encourage new membership, regular communication, systematic problem solving and a preparedness to share success (Moore & Brooks, 2000)”
“Potentially negative influences include the need for members to conform and the subsequent loss of individuality… and the potential to hoard knowledge and thus restrict innovation… Also noteworthy is the potential for community structures to exert pressure on some individuals to engage in nonconforming rather than conforming behaviours, resulting in dissidents and the formation of sub-communities..”
“Sense of community is based on an attachment relationship and this relationship is not based on the interactions with any one member of the community but instead with any member (Hill, 1996)”
“Sense of community has been defined as ‘a sense that members have a belonging, members matter to one another and to the group and a shared faith that member’s needs will be met through their commitment to be together’(McMillan & Chavis, 1986p.9)
Strategies to support a good online community might include:
- a common symbol system
- establishing a common purpose
- facilitating frequent and easy meetings
- developing a sense of place
- being non-judgemental
“Constructionism is seen as offering an important bridge between cognitive and sociocultural perspectives on cognitive development, by arguing that individual development cycles are enhanced by shared constructive activity in the social environment. Furthermore, social settings are enhanced by the cognitive development of the individual”
“It has been suggested that the social construction of knowledge in the online environment progresses through five sequential phases (Gunawardena, Lowe & Anderson, 1997):
Sharing and comparing of information: statements of opinion and observation and corroborating examples provided by one or more participants characterise phase one
The discovery of exploration of dissonance or inconsistency among ideas, concepts or statements: Phase two identifies and states areas of disagreement, and perhaps escalates conflict through reference to research or experience
The negotiation of meaning: exploration of meaning and the identifying of areas of agreement characterise phase three
Testing and modification of proposed synthesis or co-construction: phase four is characterised by testing the proposed synthesis against ‘received fact’; as shared by the participants and/or their culture
Agreement statements and the application of newly constructed meaning: metacognitive statements by the participants, illustrating their understanding that their new knowledge or ways of thinking have changed, characterise phase five.
People may participate in communities because of the perceived benefits even if their nature is to avoid such interactions – teachers may need to emphasise the benefits in ’selling’ the community
“Factors that may influence community development include policies…, the discipline and education level of the course…, the instructor… and the students. At a process level, influencing factors include the purpose the community serves in the lives of its members.., support for communication…, the nature of meetings… and the gathering place…”
Some ideas, tips and strategies:
“It has been suggested that the role of the instructor is pivotal in the development of online learning communities… The manner in which this role is approached depends on the characteristics and beliefs of the instructor…, including educational philosophies…, perceptions of self as either connected of separate… and perceptions of their role. Other considerations include the instructor’s online experience, the nature of the social environment they develop and the manner in which they manage the learning environment”
“The nature of the cohort, including the number of participants, may also influence community development strategies. In asynchronous environments, groups size is recommended to be no larger than 25, while 10 is suggested for the synchronous environment”
“Groups that are dominated by individuals who perceive themselves as separate are likely to be characterised by competition, while those dominated by connected individuals are likely to be characterised by cooperation”
“Essential in the formation of all communities is the purpose that the community serves in the lives of its members”
“Purpose may reflect the manner in which student participation is encouraged. Suggestions include mandated participation through the allocation of grades…, providing an increase in intellectual resources through guest experts…, presenting a problem or disorienting dilemma… and linking activities to the lived in world… The purpose and context may also be established through encouraging collaborative construction of knowledge…, facilitated through group work or projects… or by the instructor acting as an agent provocateur”
“An essential requirement for community development is regular and meaningful meetings… Communication may be encouraged through grading participation, based on the quantity or quality of communications…, requesting responses…, establishing a sense of positive outcome as a result of belonging… and encouraging members to pay their dues.”
“Setting an appropriate pace and schedule for participation that maintains active engagement, without dominating the learning experience, may provide further support”
“Strategies that promote connectedness include engendering the human elements of community… and establishing user profiles… Additional strategies include welcoming new members, sharing wisdom, resolving problems and sharing success…”
I think that the user profiles part in particular is important – the more you know about someone the more interested you are in what they have to say. Questions might also be framed in such a way that learners are encouraged to relate them directly to their experiences, bringing personal anecdotes to the discussion. An initial face-to-face orientation session is also a useful idea as a way of creating connections – maybe voice or even video chat (even avatar based) could add something. – Maybe a chat session in second life?
“Supporting communication includes assisting students in becoming proficient with the technology…, developing text based communication skills… and instituting a sequencing of activities…”
“Due to the more independent nature of the online learning environment, there is a need to support students in managing their own learning experience including setting goals and prioritising tasks… It is also useful to provide weekly reminders… and clearly state roles and responsibilities…”
“Given the importance of non-verbal factors in communication…, which are to a large extent absent in text based environments…, helping students develop text based communication skills may also support community development…”
The rather glaring alternative to this – or perhaps supplement – is to be less reliant on text for communication – again, audio, video, images and virtual world based communication might help level the playing field a little here. I’d say that half of the fellow students in my class have English as a second language and while you get the gist of what they are saying in text, it may well come across more effectively in other ways.
There’s a bit of other stuff about encouraging respect and trust with codes of conduct – I’d suggest that these be generated by the group and possibly even subject to regular review. It also talks about creating a greater sense of place by using welcoming messages (hmm maybe) and acknowledging individual contributions, making sure that trade in ideas and information is fair (some people will just lurk, it’s the nature of the boards) and avoiding anonymity and “electronic self”s
Quite a few interesting ideas which draw on a lot of research that has come before – I would have liked to have seen a few more specific strategies for encouraging contributions beyond the initial entry point but all in all, this is a useful piece of writing.
September 17th, 2007
Wenger, E. C. and W. M.Snyder (2000). Communities of practice: The organizational frontier. Harvard Business Review 78(1): 139.
An interesting overview of some useful guidelines for setting up and running a successful community of practice. This is heavily business oriented and the communities seem to all be based within one organisation but some of the ideas are still useful – particularly as these are things that can be hard to sell to the finance types who need to pin measurable achievements to money spent.
“What are communities of practice? In brief, they’re groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise”
“People in communities of practice share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems”
“Communities of practice… are informal – they organise themselves, meaning they set their own agendas and establish their own leadership. And membership in a community of practice is self-selected”
There’s a lot of stuff in here about the need for strong organisational support in nurturing a community of practice in a business – ideally there will be a senior executive who is able to step in and provide support when the community identifies problems (such as I.T infrastructure that holds things up) . They also make the point that managers need to use non-traditional means to assess the value of the community of practice – anecdotal evidence from participants about how problems were solved etc. (Good forum for sharing “best practice”). (Apparently they can also help with staff retention)
In essence, this might be a useful paper with a lot of case-study type examples if you were wanting to create a c.o.p in your large enterprise – but there’s virtually nothing about communities that stretch across fields.
September 16th, 2007
The discussion board is a highly useful tool in network based learning, offering learners (and teachers) a space to collaborate and share information and opinions about course content and class work. As an asynchronous form of computer mediated communication, it provides flexibility, accessibility and a level playing field for learners who might not normally feel comfortable speaking up in a face-to-face class.
It’s important to recognise however, that an effective discussion board – one with regular, meaningful posts from a majority of the class – doesn’t run itself and it is the responsibility of a moderator (generally the teacher) to “initiate and sustain the interaction in a networked learning community”(Levin, 1999).
This is done initially through orientation and socialisation (Salmon, 2004) and by providing clear objectives and guidelines (Graham, Cagiltay, Lim, Craner & Duffy, 2001) for the use of the board.
Graham et al (2001) offer a number of practical suggestions for this:
- “Discussions should be focused on a task”
- “Learners should receive feedback on their discussions”
- “Instructors should post expectations for discussions”
- “Instructors can still give prompt feedback on discussion assignments by responding to the class as a whole instead of to each student”
This might involve contacting the learners individually at the start of the course to ensure they are able to access the discussion board, running a face-to-face orientation session to the technology, encouraging them to make a brief post about themselves (and comment on others) and offering clear information about the role discussion plays in subject assessment.
It could also involve driving discussion by posting relevant topics or “sparks” (Salmon, 2004) and responding to queries in a timely manner.
In my role as an educational multimedia designer, I regularly work with teachers at CIT (Canberra Institute of Technology) who don’t understand why their students aren’t making use of the discussion boards in their WebCT courses. Frequently it’s because the learners have been told that the board is there and have then been left to their own devices with it. Other times teachers regularly post discussion questions but don’t always follow up with feedback.
I must admit that the first time I had my multimedia students use individual blogs for their work/process journal with the aim of stimulating critical reflection, half of them thought they had to set up a new blog account each week and I’d offered no real guidelines on post length, specific content or frequency – so I am aware that it’s an area that requires a certain amount of thought as a designer.
Gilly Salmon’s 2004 book “e moderating – the guide to teaching and learning online” is a great resource for teachers looking for practical guidelines. She offers a 5 stage scaffolded model which moves from Access and Motivation to Online Socialisation to Information Exchange to Knowledge Construction and finally to Development, where learners largely drive discussion on their own.
Levin, J. (1999). Understanding the Lifecycles of Network-based Learning Communities. Paper presented at Symposium 6.29 “Indicators of Change in Computer-Based Community Building” Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association,Montreal, April 1999 . Retrieved 10 July 2006 from http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/j-levin/Levin-Cervantes.final.html
Salmon, G (2004) emoderating – the key to teaching and learning online (2nd ed.) London, UK. Taylor and Francis books ltd.
Graham, C., Cagiltay, K., Lim, B-R., Craner, J., & Duffy, T. M. (2001). Seven principles of effective teaching: A practical lens for evaluating online courses. The Technology Source Archives at the University of North Carolina
August 19th, 2007
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August 19th, 2007
Brown, J., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, Jan/Feb, 32-42.
I’m not sure whether these articles are making more sense to me now because I’m getting a stronger grasp on the underlying theories or if it’s just that they are better written. Probably a bit of both.
Brown, Collins and Duguid present their ideas about why content is more meaningful to learners when it is put into context in an easily understandable way, using plenty of examples as well as some very effective analogies. Their approach seems much more anchored in chalkface experience and constantly focusses on educational practice in schools, rather that making lofty prognostications about what approaches might be beneficial for learners.
Key points:
“Many methods of didactic education assume a separation between knowing and doing, treating knowledge as an integral, self-sufficient substance, theoretically independent of the situations in which it is learned and used.”
We should “embed learning in activity and make deliberate use of the social and physical context”
Learning vocabulary with a dictionary and a few example (but out of context) sentences is different to the way words are learnt in day to day life – through use in normal conversation and reading. “Experienced readers implicitly understand that words are situated. They, therefore, ask for the rest of the sentence or the context before committing themselves to an interpretation of a word”
“All knowledge is, we believe, like language. It’s constituent parts index the world and so are intextricably a product of the activity and situations in whch they are produced”
“A concept, like the meaning of a word, is always under construction”
“It may be more useful to consider conceptual knowledge as, in some ways, similar to a set of tools. Tools share several significant features with knowledge – They can only be fully understood with use and using them entails both changing the users view of the world and adopting the belief system in which they are used.”
“People who use tools actively rather than just acquire them, by contrast, build an increasingly rich implicit understanding of the world in which they use the tools and of the tools themselves. The understanding, both of the world and of the tool, continually changes as a result of their interaction”
“Learning how to use a tool involves far more than can be accounted for in any set of explicit rules. The occasions and conditions for use arise directly out of the context of activities of each community that uses the tool, framed by the way members of that community see the world… Thus carpenters and cabinet makers use chisels differently”
“Activity, concept and culture are interdependent. No one can be totally understood without the other two. Learning must involve all three”
“(Students) need to be exposed to the use of a domain’s conceptual tools in authentic activity – to teachers acting as practitioners and using these tools in wrestling with the problems of the world. Such activity can tease out the way a mathematician or historian looks at the world and solves emergent problems. (But maths is a tool used in different ways by different practitioners – eg mathematician vs statistician vs engineer – how do you apply context there – perhaps by looking at the content being covered and seeing who it is most applicable to?)
“Activity also provides experience, which is plainly important for subsequent action”
“Knowledge… indexes the situation in which it arises and is used. The embedding circumstances efficiently provide essential parts of its structure and meaning”
“By beginning with a task embedded in a familiar activity, it shows the students the legitimacy of their implicit knowledge and its availability as scaffolding in apparently unfamiliar tasks”
“By allowing students to generate their own solution paths, it helps make them conscious, creative members of the culture of problem-solving mathematicians. And, in enculturating though this activity, they acquire some of the cultures tools – a shared vocabulary and the means to discuss, reflect upon, evaluate and validate community procedures in a collaborative process”
“Collaboration also leads to the articulation of strategies, which can then be discussed and reflected on. This, in turn, fosters generalising, grounding in the students situated understanding”
“… teachers or coaches promote learning, firstly by making explicit their tacit knowledge or by modelling their strategies for students in authentic activity. Then, teachers and colleagues support student’s attempts at doing the task. And finally they empower the students to continue independently”
“An intriguing role in learning is played by ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, where people who are not taking part directly in a particular activity learn a great deal from their legitimate position on the periphery”
“This peripheral participation is particularly important for people entering the culture. They need to observe how practitioners at various levels behave and talk to get a sense of how expertise is manifest in conversation and other activities”
“Collective problem solving: Groups are not just a convenient way to accumulate the individual knowledge of their members. They give rise synergistically to insights and solutions that would not come about without them”
“Displaying multiple roles: Successful execution of most individual tasks requires students to understand the many different roles needed for carrying out any cognitive task. Getting one person to be able to play all the roles entailed by authentic activity and to reflect productively upon his or her performance is one of the monumental tasks of education. The group, however, permits different roles to be displayed and engenders reflective narratives and discussions about the aptness of those roles” – Is it enough for people to be able to discuss the tasks that someone else undertook in a group task for them to understand what is really involved without having done it?
“Groups can be efficient in drawing out, confronting and discussing both misconceptions and ineffective strategies”
Overall, a lot of interesting ideas here – it got a little more abstract as it continued and the concepts got more advanced but most of it makes sense.
April 25th, 2007
