Som Naidu & Sanna Jarvela (2006)
Analyzing CMC content for what?
Computers and Education, 46,1, 96-103
Review of the articles in the special edition
What needs to be understood?
Leads to the question of what constitutes collaborative learning and the processes that determine its success
What is it? P99 ‘Collaboration involves sharing information, understanding, experience and expertise. There can be many types of collaborative activity which may manifest in several ways while serving many different functions. For example collaborative could serve as a ‘ culturative process which helps participants to become members of a knowledge community that are different from knowledge communities they already belong to’
KRO Why is collaborative learning desirable ? –CF – an approach to learning based on doing something and sharing the doing with peers
P97 ‘ provides a natural setting for self explanation and explaining to others’
P97 ‘Can interaction be more rich in the service of learning when it is not spatial ( in terms of teacher-student interaction or discourse) but virtual, asynchronous, multimediated and not linear?’
‘What are the interactions for supporting productive joint engagement and shared understanding?’
Collaborative traits . Authors claim that these are learned behaviours p100 ‘ characteristics of this trait include a willingness to share, demonstration of respect towards alternative views and dispositions, and the ability to listen carefully and attentively (Koschmann, 1996).
Methodological considerations
P98 ‘ Strategies for the analysis of a particular type of CMC application will have to be carefully selected or developed in alignment with the purposes that the conversation is designed to engender. Furthermore, care needs to be exercised against over analyzing CMC content, or attempting to apply overly reductionist strategies to the study os a rather complex communication channel ( Hemelo-Silver, 2003; Schrire, 2005)
Articles in the special edition identified the following as important steps
P98
· ‘Determination of a unit of analysis
· Development of a segmentation procedure
· Determination of the reliability of the segmentation procedure
· Development of coding categories and rules and
· Determination of the reliability of the coding strategies’
What kinds of RQs
What are successful and critical attributes of CSCL environments
What are the successful and critical attributes of collaborative learners?
How can one generate and engender these ‘attributes and behaviours’ in CSCL environments
Need to consider whether the process of collaboration is facilitated or directed
Theoretical frameworks
P99 ‘strategies should have a strong theoretical base’ ‘ It is arguable that a search for a theoretical base for research into computer mediated communications is rather far fetched and unrealistic. After all CMC is not much more than writing short letters via networked computers. Yet, it is different ……. Because it has a unique set of forms, norms and conventions’
P100 ‘During the recent years there has been a lively discussion on whether we should follow an individual or social perspectives on activity and should we conceptualize the current understanding on situative or cognitive approaches ( e.g. Anderson, Greeno, Reder and Simon, 2000). Through the influence of sociocultural and situated cognition theories, it has been recognized that individual learners are also influenced by social values and context in which the learning takes place. Cognition and social interaction is no more a separate variable or a distinct factor, which can be applied in explanation of an individual readiness to act or learn – but reflective of the social and cultural environment’
Conclusion
Complex interaction of cognitive, social, emotional, motivation
Need p101 ‘data from multiple sources’ e.g. Schrire(2005) –in the special issue.
Students’ self analysis of contributions to online asynchronous discussions
Elizabeth Murphy (2005)
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology , 21(2), 155-172
Findings support Kanuka and Anderson (1998) p166 ‘construction of knowledge is not an observable activity’ (KRO ? instead - may not always be observable)
Kunuka, H., & Anderson, T. (1998)
Online social interchange, discord, and knowledge construction. Journal of Distance Education, 13(1) http://cade.athabascau.ca/vol13.1/kanuka.html
KRO - ? a way of developing meta skills for knowledge construction
Reflects the competencies required to learn online collaboratively
Method
Provide a set of four activities for students ( mature – education) to self assess in a social contructivist learning context by looking at
1. No. of postings made on a weekly basis and their length. Includes bar chart as a visual representation.
2. Analysis of claims and gounds (evidence), 8 claim types, 6 ground type. Look at number made, and distribution over the modules. Includes bar chart as a visual representation.
3. Reflect on these
Findings - Reflection by the student ( the last activity, qualitative data)
‘by nature relatively quiet ….. even in a group setting’
‘only contribute when something significant to add’
method of contributing – ‘disrupting mindsets’
try to get others to interogate their understanding
‘In trying to advance the discussion and promote knowledge building , I aim to include a personal element in my posting to exemplify metacognitive activity taking place. If other learners witness the occurrence of personal refelection and introspection, they may be inclined to do the same’
‘In trying to avoid repetition among postings, which would detract from reader interest, I attempted to add novel thoughts and ideas to stimulate further discussion’
‘although the contents of these twenty messages may not have directly contributed to the construction of knowledge, they played a role in establishing group dynamicsand infacilitating collaborative learning processes. Even informing the group of my personal situation throughout the last week ( getting married) of the group project was critical in maintaining the level of trust and confidence that had been established within our group’
‘many of my messages contained positive feedback in relation to the group’s efforts, thus contributing to the sense of morale that characterised our group’
‘I argue that the absence of this social ‘human’ element would have hindered the group’s eventual success and detracted from the learning that occurred through completion of the collaborative project’
‘I know there were many postings from other students that stimulated my thinking and that resulted in the reconstruction and reshaping of my own knowledge, yet I did not respond to these postings in the discussion forum’
Conclusion ( of the student)
· Shorten messages
· Read and respond to the messages of others
· See to ongoing participation
· Self analysis has been useful
Maarten de Laat & Vic Lally (2003)
Complexity, theory and praxis: Researching collaborative learning and tutoring processes in a networked learning community
Instructional Science 31: 7-39,
P29 ‘ a kind of exploratory coversation between theory and praxis that may be mediated by methodology’
Theory
P8 Stenhouse 1983 ‘ argued that the development of theoretical understanding of educational action and doing educational research into the practical problems of education are inseparable.’
On complexity the authors argue that ‘no single theoretical framework is yet capable of offering us a sufficiently powerful articulation of description, rhetoric, inference or application’ ( the 4 ways in which theory can contribute). Theories differ in focus and some are, to an extent, complimentary.
Praxis ( teaching and learning - of both the teacher and the learner is also complex)
Methodology
Then there is the question of methodology. Theory influences what we focus on but does not tell us how. P10 ‘ Methodology assists the conversation between theory and praxis by providing rules for their interaction. However, as a community of researchers, we are still confronted with the methodological challenge of agreeing the rules’
Comment on Content analysis
· Can be cumbersome and time consuming
· Choice of coding strategy
· Can be issues of reliability and validity due to subjectivity when interpreting codes
· Multiplicity of meaning in one unit of analysis
· P11 ‘ more fundamentally, the available theoretical framework may not be sufficiently robust to enable valid inferences to be made about any of these processes from the textual traces’
· ‘Furthermore, what does one do about those aspects of learning that are
not expressed in, and therefore not amenable to, content analysis’
get Hara, Bonk and Angeli (2000) Content analysis of online discussion in an applied educational psychology course, Instructional Science 28(2) 115-152
p18 there is an important question when deciding on methodology p18 ‘ it could be argued that a more grounded approach, ( compared to content analysis) using categories that emerge from a reading of the messages, would provide a more ‘authentic’ summary of the intentions of the participants. In outr view this is a valid and important way of approaching the analysis. However we wanted to connect with some of the conceptual and theoretical ideas about learning and tutoring in the literature using schemas that were already in use’ It also means that results can be more easily shared and compared with other researchers.
Theoretical frameworks (of the study)
1. Social constructivist
Therefore search for evidence that learners are linking new knowledge to their prior knowledge to actively construct new internal representations.
2. the situativity of learning and meaningfulness
p13 ‘ learning as a set of processes by which a learner personalizes new ideas by giving meaning to them, based upon earlier experiences. However meaning is also rooted in, and indexed by experience ( Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989). Therefore, each experience with an idea, and the environment of which that idea is part, becomes part of the meaning of that idea ( Duffy and Jonassen, 1992). Learning is therefore viewed and considered by us as situated by the activity in which it takes place ( Brown et al., 1989; Lave and Wenger, 1991). This view has led us to also seek evidence , in the online texts, for the cognitive, social, and affective processes in which participants engage in trying to make meaning of the ideas presented to them by the tasks they are undertaking’ We have also used Critical Event Recall (CER) to try to access the meaning making, and awareness of context, that participants use to make judgements and engage in activities in their course of study’
3. group dimensions of learning
( Lave, 1996, Levine, Resnick & Higgins, 1996, Wegerith, Mercer & Dawes, 1999) – the role of the group in shaping and driving individual cognition. There are three aspects
· the group situation p13 the situation itself may exert a strong mediating effect on individual cognitive and conceptual processes; the thinking of individuals is influenced by the group in which they are working’
· merger of intellectual and social processes
· ‘tension between the conceptual structure or understanding ( of the problem or ideas under discussion) of the group of individuals within it. These individual understanding may vary from each other as well as from the group. This tension may be the driving force for the collective processing of the group. So, for example when an individual member of the group expresses his or her opinion in relation to the shared public understanding of the group, this may be based on an attempt to synthesise the understanding with the public ( that is group or shared) one. The other members of the group might compare this new synthesis with their own understandings of the group-accepted version and their own disagreements with it. Depending on the outcome of this process there may be further interaction and negotiation until a new meaning or understanding is accepted by the group. ’
p14 ‘ In this way interaction between individuals, as well as their shared and individual cognitions, can be viewed as key aspects of the co-construction of knowledge, meaning and understanding
4. socio-cultural
p14 ‘ whereas the social-constructivist perspectives makes a distinction between the individual cognitive activities and the environment in which the individual is present, the socio-cultural perspective regards the individual as part of that environment’ According to this view , learning cannot be understood as a process that is solely in the mind of the learner (Van der Linden & Kanselaar, 2000). Learning is a process of participating in cultural practices, a process that structures and shapes cognitive activity ( Lave & Wenger, 1991)’ Therefore negotiation is an important aspect p14 ‘ additionally , they can motivate each other and help each other to finish the task’
Research approach
‘attempt to reveal and understand the richness of processes beyond the capability of any one of the methods, when used by itself’
p12 ‘ it is the interaction between teaching and learning that is of central importance in all educational endeavours. Therefore one of our key aims is to enquire systematically into this key educational interaction’ ‘Learning and tutoring, as ongoing sets of processes, happening in time and space, within an individual or a group, do not feature in detail in this general analysis’
‘ a parallel focus on group and individual processes’
Method
Content analysis of individual ( student and tutor) contributions and differences in learning and tutoring processes. (KRO but note that tutor contributions do not include any social or affective)
Integrated with the use of Critical Event Recall (CER) to probe learning and teaching that may not be expressed in the text records used for the data analysis
Participants
Masters in E-Learning based on an action research approach to professional development. A sophisticated group of professionals who communicate outside the formal Web CT environment. Many are mature learners who bring more than one relevant body of expertise to the course’
Focus on one group, 7 students and 1 tutor ( does not say how selected) engaged in a 10 week course.
RQ
What is the relationship between knowledge construction (learning) and tutoring processes as these evolved over time within the workshop?
Content analysis
Used NVivo p16 ‘ to search, by individual participant, for his or her contributions to each category of the learning and tutoring coding schemes’
Approx 1000 messages , sampled 10% from three phases, beginning, middle, and end.
Unit of analysis – p17 ‘ using semantic features such as ideas, argument chains, topics of discussion, or by regulative activities such as making a plan or explaining unclear information. ( Chi, M.T.H. (1997) Quantifying qualitative analyses of verbal data: A practical guide. Journal of the Learning Sciences 6, 271-313.). Thus, the content of the messages had to be read for meaning to determine segment boundaries.’ i.e. used semantic rather than syntactic boundaries.
Learning ( content analysis of student text)
Used code ( 23 items) developed by Veldhuis-Diermanse for a PhD thesis (unpublished)
Cognitive
Debating (5 items)
Using external information and experiences(4 items)
Linking or repeating internal information ( 2 items )
Affective
General: reacting emotionally to notes of peers without recting directly to the content of that note. This reaction can be +,_- or neutral
Asking for (general) feedback, responses or opinions by fellow-students
‘Chatting’ or ‘social talks ‘ contributions that are not relevant to solve the case/task
metacognitive ( some of these include social processes)
planning ( 3 items)
keeping clarity ( 3 items)
monitoring (2 activities)
rest activities ( units that cannot be decoded by using the above categories
Teaching ( 19 indicators) from ( Anderson, T., Rourke, L., Garrison, D.R. & Archer, W. (2000). Assessing Teaching Presence in a Computer Conference Context. http:///www.atl.ualberta.ca/cmc/publications.html)
Instructional design and organization ( 6 indicators)
Facilitating discourse (6 indicators)
Direct instruction (7 indicators)
Critical Event Recall p32 ‘has the potential to access asepects of learning and tutoring that are not directly available in the discussion transcripts’
P18 ‘ the recall enables the articulation of many previously unexpressed aspects of learning’
Trigger for tutor recall was
1. Summary based on the content analysis of the student interactions – ‘ an overview of the patterns of learning’
2. Full summary ( therefore tutor able to select what were the critical events for him)
Results
Content analysis
Learning (students)
Descriptive , presented by items and individuals in tabular form.
| | beginning | mid | end |
| Cognitive | 60% | 81% | 42% |
| metacognitive | 20% | 14% | 20% |
| affective | 14% | 3% | 8.9% |
| miscellaneous | | 1.9& | 28.8% |
Tutor/teaching
Instructional design codes at high level initially (51%), then 22%,33%
Facilitation initially (41%) then rises to (75%), 64%.
Some of the students make contributions that are rated as high for tutor processes, including two student who maintains this instructional mode in the mid phase whereas for another this declines during the mid and final stages.
Critical Incident Recall
Tutor agenda
· Concern with the learning process
· Constant awareness of the dynamics of the group
In particular
Containing Charles who is mostly thinking about getting task completed rather than the process of doing the task
Andrea also strong but supportive, also trying to hold Charles, so tutor tried to support her in doing this but staying neutral and keeping a small footprint
‘trying to avoid them making any decisions before the rest of the group appeared’
at one point offered up two ideas as catalysts.
During the middle phase p26 ‘conscious of sitting back’,’but I was tracking it, like a hawk really, but I was in a more relaxed mode’
Then started to ‘focus more on the dynamics within the group’
‘sense of two groups forming’ two, maybe three cracking on whereas ‘ the others were more shadowy figures’
Kate struggled the most and seemed able to find a niche , she articulated her struggle, ‘Andrea responded academically’…..’ whereas Pauline gave a more emotional response’ and ‘seemed to respond to her more as a person’
Articulates some assumptions about members of the group – e.g. Bill new to this form of learning ( note from learning analysis Bill’s participation level increased as the course progressed ? as the purpose of the exercise clarified for him.
Kate – difficult personal circumstances – p28 ‘her model of the experience to come was possibly of a more directive nature, so it was a struggle to accept a new mind set of knowledge being distributed amongst themselves’
Felicity ‘ she felt more comfortable thinking about the task than providing tutoring support for others’ – ‘ she was wuite a strong person but did not dominate’
Conclusions
P29 the tutor was actively engaged in a social process of actively designing his involvement through interaction, with a view to actively enhancing the learning of the group members. He was concerned ……. To maintain balance and integration within the group’
‘the complexity of practice in networked collaborative learning envionments is such that models of social-constructivism, situated learning and socio-cultural theory are not, separately capable of providing an account of the role of learning in meaning making, the function of context or the power of the interaction between tutoring and learning processes’
‘results show …. How professionals collaborate successfully to develop their own practice
Dillenbourg, P. (1999)
What do you mean by collaborative learning?
In P. Dillenbourg (Ed) Collaborative-learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches
P1-19
Oxford: Elsevier
Term - No shared usage. In the context leaning P reckons that it is best to think in terms of the following 3 dimension
1. scale of the situation ( group size and time scale) ,
nb CSCL in general refers to a group of more than 40.
4 sub heading but they are all, to an extent, interrelated.
Frameworks depend on scale psychology for small groups, social psychology for larger groups with sociology, ethnology, anthropology for larger scales. From this view cognitive and social have been distinct until notion of distributed cognition (KRO ? group dynamics – does the same apply),
notion of culture p2 now applied to describe the common grounds built by peers in interaction’ ‘ e.g. p3 ‘ if one talks about culture built by two subjects after an our of interaction the term culture acquires a cultural flavour’ but during transfer across different scales, theses concepts undergo deformations’
Dialogue with ones self – is it a form of collaboration ? self explanation versus explanation with others. Chapter 6 did not find any real differences p 3 ‘ authors did not find any real evidence that the interactivity of real explanation brings any benefit compared to self explanation’
Unit of analysis ‘ This evolution of research, where a group can be viewed as a unit or the individual as a group, indicates that the very notion of ‘scale’ actually changes: it moves from being a property of the object to a propoerrty of the observer, who selects the most appropriate unit of analysis’
2. What do we mean by learning ?
p4/5 “ The variety of uses of the word ‘learning’ reflect two distinct understandings of ‘collaborative learning’:
· is it a pedagogical method’ and therefore prescribed
· or a psychological process , the mechanism by which we learn.
D argues against both views
· take the ‘mechanism view’ need to perform activities which trigger learning whether as an individual or with peers. i.e. p5 ‘interaction among subjects generates extra activities ( explanation, disagreement, mutual regulation…) which trigger extra cognitive mechanisms ( knowledge elicitation, internalization, reduced cognitive load ….) …… However …… there is no guarantee that these mechanisms occur in any collaborative interactions. On the other hand, they do not occur only during collaboration. At some level of description – at least the neurone level- the mechanisms potentially involved in collaborative learning are the same as those potentially involved in individual cognition ( maybe KRO can argue against this?)
· take the method view ‘collaborative learning is not a method because of the low predictability of specific types of interactions’ ( KRO ? AI perspective)
‘In summary, the words ‘collaborative learning’ describe a situation in which particular forms of interaction among people are expected to occur, which would trigger learning mechanisms, but there is no guarantee that the expected interactions will actually occur. Hence a general concern is to develop ways to increase the probability that some types of interaction occur.’
These can be classified into 4 categories , 3 of which are addressed in the book.
Increasing the probability that interactions will occur
Set up the initial conditions.
P5 ‘ beyond a few main results, it appears that these conditions interact with each other in a complex way ( Dillenbourgh, Baker, Blaye & O’Malley, 1995) , the group heterogeneity effect will for instance be different for different tasks. Because of these multiple interactions, it is very difficult to set up initial conditions which guarantee the effectiveness of collaborative learning’ ( KRO but how do you specify effective?)
Over-specify the ‘collaboration’ contract with a scenario based on roles
P5 ‘ this approach turns collaborative learning into a method’
Scaffold productive interactions by encompassing interaction rules in the medium
Either by teacher or by technology e.g. using pre-defined buttons ‘do you agree?’ etc p6 ‘ However, the case study presented in chapter 3 shows that the interface constitutes a tool – semiotic and physical - that users have to appropriate and which affects their understanding of the task beyond simple facilitation/inhibition of particular types of interactions.
Monitor and regulate the interactions
Accomplished either by the
· Tutor role changes to one of facilitator ‘
· Technology providing minor pedagogical intervention’ widgets, analytics. Question in 1999 ‘ ‘whether peers are able to self-regulate their interaction with this type of feedback?’
3. what is referred to as collaboration’
the adjective collaboration concerns four aspects
· situation
· interaction
· learning mechanisms
· effects and the divergent views on how to measure it
situation
p7 ‘ intuitively a situation is termed ‘collaborative’ if peers are more or less at the same level, can perform the same actions, have a common goal and work together .’
· need to consider symmetry between learners, how much, how to manage it.
· raises questions about how to translate learning task into a shared goal. P8 ‘shared goals can only be partially set up at the outset of collaboration, they themselves have to be negotiated,…… goal discrepancies are often revealed through disagreements on action. . Through the negotiation of goals, agents not only develop shared goals, but they also become mutually aware of their shared goals. ‘
· also low division of labour ( cf cooperation when roles are shared out) is more likely to lead to more interaction and therefore more collaboration.
Interaction
· Operationalisation :P 8 where ‘ the degree of interactivity among peers is not defined by the frequency of the interactions but by the extent to which these interaction influence the peers’ cognitive processes. The degree of interweaving between reasoning and interaction is difficult to define operationally’
· Synchronicity: ‘doing something together implies synchronous communication while cooperation is often associated with asynchronous communication’ …….’ Is synchronicity less a technical parameter than a social rule. Is it a considerate meta-communicative contract?’ …. ‘if the medium breaks the conversational rules established for another medium, users create new ways of maintaining this subjective feeling of synchronicity of reasoning’
· Negotiation: collaborative interactions are negotiable e.g. negotiate how to act ( KRO possibly something I could measure?) ‘p10 ‘ the grounding process is the bottom layer of the negotiation process ( Dillenbourg & traum). This grounding +negotiation process , i.e. the way through which partners can build a shared solution, hence became a central concern in collaborative learning. Chapter 3 is an ambitious attempt to relate linguistic theory, developed by Clark and several colleagues, with the learning mechanism described by the cultural-historical psychology’.
‘The space for misunderstanding plays in grounding the same role as the space for negotiation in agreement. It constitutes an important element in modeling the dynamics of collaborative learning’ ‘ When two partners misunderstand, they have to build explanations, justify themselves, reformulate statements, and so on and all of these activities can lead to learning. Hence, in contrast with DAI and linguistic criteria, a collaborative learning situation should not eliminate ( if possible) the probability of misunderstanding ( in order to reduce the cost of communication) but instead leave the space for misunderstanding that is necessary for sustaining the subjects’ efforts to overcome miscommunication’
learning mechanisms
· work at the individual level of learning has identified: induction, cognitive load, self explanation, conflict ( Piaget). P11 Theses processes occur more often or more spontaneously in collaborative situations’
· Are there other learning processes that would be specific to social interactions? grounding and mutual modeling
Internalization ‘i.e. the transfer of tools from the social plane ( interaction with others) to the inner plane ( reasoning) Wertsch(1985) ( in a different context) claimed that an important step was ‘when the child becomes able to use the to-be-internalised concepts in conversation with his mother’ ‘Chapter 3 authors might rephrase Wersch’s findings by saying that the concept has been grounded’ another often quoted mechanism is appropriation ( Rogoff, 1990) by which an agent reinterprets his own action or utterance under the light of what his partner does or says next ( Fox, 1987)’ …. ‘An hypotheis mentioned in Chapter 7 is that mutual modeling implies some differential reasoning ( comparing what I do or know to what my partner does or knows) and that the perception of discrepncies with respect to one’s partner knowledge increases the awareness of one’s own knowledge’
Effects
P12 difficult to specify
Theories of collaborative learning
P13 ‘ At a first glance the situation generates interaction patterns, these interactions trigger cognitive mechanisms which in turn generate cognitive effects’
However such a linear causality is s simplification. Most relations are reciprocal. The elements just specified are all related to each other through bidirectional links.
Collaborative learning prospers when there is the necessity of continuous explanation to each other’
cf CF