Co-located single display collaborative learning for early childhood education

The benefits of collaborative learning are well documented. However, most of the research has been done with children beyond the ages of early childhood. This could be due to the common and erroneous belief that young children have not developed the capacity to work collaboratively toward a given aim. In this paper we show how small group co-located collaborative learning on a single display computer improves oral language, logical-mathematical and social skills in pre-school children. Considering that early childhood teachers have a responsibility to provide a supportive environment, teacher mediation is essential in order to achieve collaborative learning. Thus, teachers were trained in the use of the technology and strategies for effective collaborative learning. The study was implemented in 10 kindergarten classrooms with 268 children between the ages of 5 and 6 years old. A group of 5 kindergarten classrooms with equivalent characteristics participated as a comparison group. During the four-month intervention, children worked on collaborative activities at least twice a week. A quasi-experimental approach was used to assess the implementation, including pre- and post-testing. The data showed differences in the learning of oral language, logical-mathematical and social skills, with the experimental group demonstrating significantly greater achievement.     

Technology supported collaborative learning for higher education: Comparative case studies in Tanzania

To learn, a person has to be able to communicate effectively with others about the knowledge to be learned. Communication processes in classrooms can be supported by Group Support Systems (GSS), that enable students to communicate anonymously and in parallel. Group Support Systems experiences suggest that the technology increases observed learning, self-reported learning, on-task participation, and satisfaction with the learning experience. The authors discuss case studies from higher education in Tanzania. The particular benefit of GSS in this environment was threefold: First, it encouraged meaningful interaction among students and between students and teachers. Local culture normally hinders this. Second, it allowed all participants to discuss sensitive topics freely. Finally, it exposed students to collaborative technologies that are expected to play a pivotal role in (global) collaborative development activities. Clearly, the use of collaborative technologies enables the participation of a broader range of students. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Implementing learning analytics in wiki-supported collaborative learning in secondary education: A framework-motivated empirical study

International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning - Learning analytics (LA) and group awareness tools are regarded as top priorities for research in the field of computer-supported...     

Monitoring a CMC environment created for distance learning

Projects using Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) are becoming of interest to all academic institutions World‐wide. STILE (Students' and Teachers' Integrated Learning Environment) is one such project which included four universities in the United Kingdom. The Open University implementation of the project was called M205‐STILE and it used a CMC environment with 110 students and nine tutors nationwide and in Europe. The participants were on‐line from February to October 1995 and the provision of these facilities allowed distance learning students to avail themselves of better communication with both their tutor and with fellow students. This paper discusses, from both the tutor and student perspective, how computer science students made use of a CMC environment created especially for them. It illustrates that students used the system to learn more about the subject area and about each other, and to sustain or motivate themselves throughout the learning period.     

Prototyping a collaborative learning tool for nurses

Abstract  A Nurse Collaborative Learning (Nurse Co-Learn) tool was designed and developed to help the Department of Nursing to introduce Information Technology to undergraduate nursing students. The MUCH (Many Using and Creating Hypermedia) system was used as the basis for this tool. The Nurse Co-Learn tool supported coordination between clinic personnel. Students were required to take on a role in the clinic, and to perform the relevant tasks for that role. Through participating in this role-playing game students learned word processing, database and spreadsheet skills, whilst performing authentic tasks. Three prototypes were developed and trialled; this paper highlights the features of the prototypes and the responses of the users.     

'Bridging Tools' for change: evaluating a collaborative learning network

Abstract  This paper outlines the evaluation approach associated with the Learn-Nett project under the SOCRATES initiative. It describes the project, locates the role of evaluation within it and finally conceptualises the role evaluation might play in a change process. The paper argues that evaluation in these circumstances can be essentially formative but also be prompted by a search for new knowledge in the area of changing practices in learning. It identifies 'transition' as anomic and the need to develop 'provisional stability' for change to occur effectively. In such periods of change, evaluation products can act as useful 'bridging tools' which can support the development of 'provisional stability'.     

The impact of learning styles on student grouping for collaborative learning: a case study

Learning style models constitute a valuable tool for improving individual learning by the use of adaptation techniques based on them. In this paper, we present how the benefit of considering learning styles with adaptation purposes, as part of the user model, can be extended to the context of collaborative learning as a key feature for group formation. We explore the effects that the combination of students with different learning styles in specific groups may have in the final results of the tasks accomplished by them collaboratively. With this aim, a case study with 166 students of computer science has been carried out, from which conclusions are drawn. We also describe how an existing web-based system can take advantage of learning style information in order to form more productive groups. Our ongoing work concerning the automatic extraction of grouping rules starting from data about previous interactions within the system is also outlined. Finally, we present our challenges, related to the continuous improvement of collaboration by the use and dynamic modification of automatic grouping rules.     

Experiences with CLARE: a computer-supported collaborative learning environment

Current collaborative learning systems focus on maximizing shared information. However, "meaningful learning" is not simply information sharing but also knowledge construction. CLARE is a computer-supported learning environment that facilitates meaningful learning through collaborative knowledge construction. It provides a semi-formal representation language called RESRA and an explicit process model called SECAI. Experimental evaluation through 300 hours of classroom usage indicates that CLARE does support meaningful learning. It also shows that a major bottleneck to computer-mediated knowledge construction is summarization. Lessons learned through the design and evaluation of CLARE provide new insights into both collaborative learning systems and collaborative learning theories.     

Analyzing collaborative learning processes automatically: Exploiting the advances of computational linguistics in computer-supported collaborative learning

In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of pedagogically valuable facets of learners’ interactions is a time consuming and effortful process. Improving automated analyses of such highly valued processes of collaborative learning by adapting and applying recent text classification technologies would make it a less arduous task to obtain insights from corpus data. This endeavor also holds the potential for enabling substantially improved on-line instruction both by providing teachers and facilitators with reports about the groups they are moderating and by triggering context sensitive collaborative learning support on an as-needed basis. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary research project, which has been investigating the effectiveness of applying text classification technology to a large CSCL corpus that has been analyzed by human coders using a theory-based multi-dimensional coding scheme. We report promising results and include an in-depth discussion of important issues such as reliability, validity, and efficiency that should be considered when deciding on the appropriateness of adopting a new technology such as TagHelper tools. One major technical contribution of this work is a demonstration that an important piece of the work towards making text classification technology effective for this purpose is designing and building linguistic pattern detectors, otherwise known as features, that can be extracted reliably from texts and that have high predictive power for the categories of discourse actions that the CSCL community is interested in.

Picbreeder: a case study in collaborative evolutionary exploration of design space

For domains in which fitness is subjective or difficult to express formally, interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) is a natural choice. It is possible that a collaborative process combining feedback from multiple users can improve the quality and quantity of generated artifacts. Picbreeder, a large-scale online experiment in collaborative interactive evolution (CIE), explores this potential. Picbreeder is an online community in which users can evolve and share images, and most importantly, continue evolving others' images. Through this process of branching from other images, and through continually increasing image complexity made possible by the underlying neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT) algorithm, evolved images proliferate unlike in any other current IEC system. This paper discusses not only the strengths of the Picbreeder approach, but its challenges and shortcomings as well, in the hope that lessons learned will inform the design of future CIE systems.     

Creating cognitive tutors for collaborative learning: steps toward realization

Our long-term research goal is to provide cognitive tutoring of collaboration within a collaborative software environment. This is a challenging goal, as intelligent tutors have traditionally focused on cognitive skills, rather than on the skills necessary to collaborate successfully. In this paper, we describe progress we have made toward this goal. Our first step was to devise a process known as bootstrapping novice data (BND), in which student problem-solving actions are collected and used to begin the development of a tutor. Next, we implemented BND by integrating a collaborative software tool, Cool Modes, with software designed to develop cognitive tutors (i.e., the cognitive tutor authoring tools). Our initial implementation of BND provides a means to directly capture data as a foundation for a collaboration tutor but does not yet fully support tutoring. Our next step was to perform two exploratory studies in which dyads of students used our integrated BND software to collaborate in solving modeling tasks. The data collected from these studies led us to identify five dimensions of collaborative and problem-solving behavior that point to the need for abstraction of student actions to better recognize, analyze, and provide feedback on collaboration. We also interviewed a domain expert who provided evidence for the advantage of bootstrapping over manual creation of a collaboration tutor. We discuss plans to use these analyses to inform and extend our tools so that we can eventually reach our goal of tutoring collaboration.     

A visual recommender tool in a collaborative learning experience

Collaborative learning incorporates a social component in distance education to minimize the disadvantages of studying in solitude. Frequent analysis of student interactions is required for assessing collaboration. Collaboration analytics arose as a discipline to study student interactions and to promote active participation in e-learning environments. Unfortunately, researchers have been more focused on finding methods to solve collaboration problems than on explaining the results to tutors and students. Yet if students do not understand the results of collaboration analysis methods, they will rarely follow their advice. In this paper we propose a tool that analyzes student interactions and visually explains the collaboration circumstances to provoke the self-reflection and promote the sensemaking about collaboration. The tool presents a visual explanatory decision tree that graphically highlights student collaboration circumstances and helps to understand the reasoning followed by the tool when prescribing a recommendation. An assessment of the tool has demonstrated: (1) the students collaboration circumstances showed by the tool are easy to understand and (2) the students could realize the possible actions to improve the collaboration process.     

Examining a collaborative assessment process in networked lifelong learning

This case study paper is concerned with the development of professional practice in networked learning environments. Through the presentation of one case (a) an assessment process in a networked learning environment which involves the learner, their peers and a tutor in making judgments about the learner's formal coursework; and (b) the role of the tutor/ teacher in these processes are examined. From an analysis of the case it is suggested that assessment should be a learning event and that networked learning course participants should be involved in making judgments about their own and their peers' learning. The benefits to learners and tutors of these collaborative learning processes are examined and discussed.     

Evaluating a graphical notation for modeling collaborative learning activities: A family of experiments

It is increasingly common to use languages and notations, mainly of a graphical nature, to assist in the design and specification of learning systems. There are several proposals, although few of them support the modeling of collaborative tasks. In this paper, we identify the main features to be considered for modeling this kind of activities and we propose the use of the CIAN notation for this purpose. In this work, we also try to empirically analyze the quality (in particular the understandability) of that notation. To this end, three empirical studies have been conducted. In these experiments we used several sources of information: subjective perception of the designers, their profiles and their performance on a set of understandability exercises, as well as the physical evidence provided by an eye tracker device. The results obtained denote positive perceptions about the use of the CIAN notation for modeling collaborative learning activities.     

Requirements elicitation for virtual actors in collaborative learning environments

This paper reports on the elicitation of requirements for Virtual Actors in Collaborative Virtual Learning Environments (CVLEs). The methodological approach followed involves the phased development of a series of learning environments which are observed in use by parents, children and teachers. The focus of study is on the interactivity and social communication issues that arise in the learning situation. The research uses as its case study the work of the Manchester Museum Education Service with children at Key Stage Level 2 (9–11 years old) of the National Curriculum. The particular learning situation is based on senet, an ancient Egyptian board game from the Museum’s collection of artefacts from the pyramid builders’ town of Kahun. Results are presented of the first phase prototype, a single display groupware system where interactions take place face-to-face in the ‘real-world’ external to the environment. Results are also presented of the second phase prototype, a multi-user groupware environment in which the users are remotely located and interaction is mainly internal to the environment. The paper discusses how the results from these two phases are being used to establish requirements for a CVLE to be developed in the third phase of research.     

Investigating user experience in Second Life for collaborative learning

Two studies on collaborative learning in Second Life are reported. The first is an ecological study of Second Life used in an undergraduate class, by observation, interviews, and limit surveys. Use of Second Life motivated students with good user experience, although they viewed it as a games technology. Second Life was used to prepare virtual meetings and presentations but not for online discussion, with Blackboard and especially Facebook providing collaborative support. In the second experimental study, the effectiveness and user experience with Second Life and Blackboard were compared, including a face-to-face control condition. There were no performance differences overall, although face-to-face was quicker and was preferred by users, followed by Blackboard and Second Life. Blackboard was perceived to be more usable, whereas Second Life provided a better user experience. Worst performance was indicated by dislike of avatar interaction in Second Life, and poor user experience in Blackboard, whereas better performance was associated with engagement with avatars, and better usability in Blackboard. The results of both studies are reviewed using Salmon's model for online learning, suggesting that Second Life helped motivation and socialisation stages, although integration with other technologies is necessary for knowledge construction. Preliminary guidelines are proposed for configuration and management of Second Life in collaborative learning. The affordances for collaboration in virtual worlds are discussed, with reflections on user experience and functional support provided by Second Life, as an exemplar of a virtual world for collaborative learning support.     

Mediating and perspective-taking manipulatives: Fostering dynamic perspective-taking by mediating dialogic thinking and bolstering empathy in role-play and reflection for microteaching

International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning - This study examined microteaching using computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) to assist student teachers in...