DCLM framework: understanding collaboration in open-ended tabletop learning environments

There is a growing understanding of the unique ways that tabletops support effective collaboration; however, this research mostly focuses on environments in which learners work towards a single shared goal. Underpinning this perspective, either implicitly or explicitly, is the theory that collaborative learning is a process of attaining convergent conceptual change. However, this model of collaboration may not apply to all scenarios where learners are working together. In particular, informal, open-ended exploratory environments support (and often promote) shared activities where the goal may not be for all participants to emerge with a single, shared understanding. There is increased interest in understanding the efficacy of designs that support (and encourage) learners to collaborate while seeking divergent goals, ideas, and conceptions. This paper advances a framework (Divergent Collaboration Learning Mechanisms - DCLM) for recognizing and coding collaboration and divergent learning in such environments. We apply the DCLM framework to an informal tabletop environment (Oztoc) as a means of highlighting how DCLM may reveal new productive interactions environments that support divergent forms of collaboration, mentorship, and learning. Analysis of participants’ interactions within Oztoc revealed that participants who have non-aligned goals can still productively collaborate, and in many cases can provide insight and feedback that would not be possible in shared-goal activities. We conclude with an examination of how open-ended exploratory environments can support communities of practice and legitimate peripheral participation, and the importance of divergent inquiry and divergent conceptual change across a range of learning environments.     

Students and applied academics: Learner agency in a changing curriculum

Abstract

Student perspectives are important, yet under‐recognized, resources for/in educational reform. This paper examines student opinions and needs with respect to curriculum reform aiming to bridge school and work. Through interviews with 20 students enrolled in applied academics courses, such as Applications of Mathematics, which attempt to integrate education, work, and life activities, we explore what matters to students and what roles they play in a changing curriculum. Findings indicate that students pursue applications courses more as a way of gaining access to curriculum and to pedagogical practices that transform their views of mathematics and of themselves as learners of mathematics than as a means toward a particular career goal. Students’ educational needs complicate and push beyond Dewey's distinction between education for and through occupations. Students became active advocates for a course taught in ways that emphasized engagement, connectedness, and collaboration where learner agency was valued and respected. Student voices provide insight into how students might participate in curriculum reform and into how such curriculum shapes them.     

Use of Twitter in the Cameroon Anglophone crisis

ABSTRACT

A growing body of literature shows that social media plays a key role during crises and conflicts. In addition to traditional media, social media are used to mobilise people for a common cause and to communicate vital information. Very little is known about social media use during crises in the sub-Saharan African context. This article presents how Twitter is being used in the ongoing Cameroon Anglophone Crisis by several groups including the government, Anglophone activists, media organisations, and everyday citizens. Using critical theoretical perspectives to examine tweets from 1 September 2016 to 31 December 2018, this article identifies key themes. These include: placement of the crisis in a contested, historical context; debates about naming the crisis; key concepts; depiction of several forms of violence; and potential options for resolution. Social media is being used by the government, Anglophone activists, and non-affiliated people to sway public opinions on the crisis and solicit the attention of local, Diaspora, and broader international communities. Social media use has loosened the grip of governmental control of media messaging and expanded the public narratives available in Cameroon, yet at the time of the writing, this does not appear to have lessened the impact of the crisis.     

Confidence and competition online: ESL student perspectives on web-based discussions in the classroom

English as a Second Language (ESL) students bring a diverse array of perspectives on language learning that inform how they negotiate different kinds of spaces in the university writing classroom. This study addresses the variance in how three different ESL students participated in web-based discussion boards and chat rooms in their first-year university writing course. Documenting students’ perceptions of technology provided pedagogical insight into how students took up or dismissed particular kinds of web-based writing. This study found that individual students made choices in their web-based writing in ways that reflected their previous experiences with technology and writing, their views of themselves as students and writers, and their relative comfort level with their peers in the classroom. However, their choices were also constrained by the pedagogical structure of the course, including the centrality of the instructor and the institutional directive for individualized assessment.     

RSS-based e-learning recommendations exploiting fuzzy FCA for Knowledge Modeling

Nowadays, Web 2.0 focuses on user generated content, data sharing and collaboration activities. Formats like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) provide structured Web information, display changes in summary form and stay updated about news headlines of interest. This trend has also affected the e-learning domain, where RSS feeds demand for dynamic learning activities, enabling learners and teachers to access to new blog posts, to keep track of new shared media, to consult Learning Objects which meet their needs.This paper presents an approach to enrich personalized e-learning experiences with user-generated content, through a contextualized RSS-feeds fruition. The synergic exploitation of Knowledge Modeling and Formal Concept Analysis techniques enables the design and development of a system that supports learners in their learning activities by collecting, conceptualizing, classifying and providing updated information on specific topics coming from relevant information sources. An agent-based layer supervises the extraction and filtering of RSS feeds whose topics cover a specific educational domain.     

Coordination processes in computer supported collaborative writing

In the COSAR-project a computer-supported collaborative learning environment enables students to collaborate in writing an argumentative essay. The TC3 groupware environment (TC3: Text Composer, Computer supported and Collaborative) offers access to relevant information sources, a private notepad, a chat facility including a chat history, and a shared word-processor. Planning tools for writing – a shared argumentation diagram for content generation and a shared outline facility for content linearization – were added to the basic TC3 environment. About 145 pairs of high school students completed essays on organ donation or cloning in the TC3 environment. We analyzed the logged discussion (‘chats’) and activity protocols for task-related processes present during discussion and collaboration. Processes looked into are planning, gathering information and composing the essay, as well as collaborative processes such as coordinating, turn taking and time management. Our main research question is how task-related planning activities and collaborative coordination with or without the help of planning tools relate to the quality of the resulting argumentative texts. Overall coordination and planning of the writing activities on a meta-level and on a content level were found to be crucial for the quality of the text.     

Boundary objects in collaborative work and learning

Boundary objects are artifacts, processes, concepts and other entities that provide bridges across boundaries and act as shared references that are meaningful for learners and collaborators with different backgrounds. In this paper, we explore cooperation in a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural context, focusing on the opportunities for learning that arise at different boundaries and on corresponding boundary objects to facilitate both collaboration and learning. We present and discuss a study we conducted within a Cooperation Technology course. The discussion provides implications for collaboration support across boundaries, including insights on why they are important, how to facilitate their creation, and how to use technologies for that. The implications are formulated as instruction for designing university courses, but can be used in a wider context.     

Leveraging underspecification in knowledge artifacts to foster collaborative activities in professional communities

Collaborative problem solving often involves actors with heterogeneous competences or that see a common problem from different perspectives: this can make mutual understanding difficult. The paper presents case studies in different domains where collaboration leverages shared representations, and discusses the main reasons why these representations succeeded in fostering mutual understanding. We observed how the technologies proposed to manage those representations were successful only to the extent they were made able to adapt to the dynamic and open conventions that actors adopted during their activities. The point of the paper is that locality, openness and underspecification are key factors in this process, for their capability to promote tacit knowledge and to let competent actors reach a sufficient level of mutual understanding towards some common goal. The paper proposes a conceptual framework to characterize the notion of knowledge artifact interpreted as a semiotic system where actors can make sense of shared and underspecified representations, and derives from this notion implications for the design of a supportive technology.     

Usability Research in the Writing Lab: Sustaining Discourse and Pedagogy

Redesigning Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL) presented the opportunity for collaboration among Writing Center and Professional Writing Program members. While the article briefly describes the OWL redesign process, the argument focuses on collaboration and presents a model for sustainable intraprogram collaboration. Following Hawhee, usability research is defined as “invention-in-the-middle,” which offers a model for understanding research process as part of the infrastructure of new media instruction as described by DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill. This article offers four stakeholder perspectives on the process of participatory technology design: of writing center administrators, graduate students, technical writing practitioners, and writing program graduate faculty members. The model asserted by this article presents a dynamic understanding of expertise and of fluidity in the roles of participants. Collaborative usability research, seen as invention-in-the-middle, contributes both to long-term sustainability of technological artifacts as well as the discursive interactions among stakeholders whose work supports these artifacts.     

Visualization of agreement and discussion processes during computer-supported collaborative learning

This study examined the effects of the shared space (SS) on students’ behaviors in a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. The SS visualizes discussion and agreement during online discussions. It was hypothesized the SS would increase the media richness of the CSCL-environment, would stimulate critical and exploratory group-norms, would lead to more positive perceptions of online collaboration, and would have an impact on students’ collaborative activities. In total, 59 students working in 20 groups had access to the SS visualization, while 58 students working in 20 groups did not. The results show that students with access to the SS visualization: (a) perceived higher media richness; (b) had a more exploratory group-norm perception; (b) perceived more positive group behavior; (c) perceived their group’s task strategies to be more effective; (d) engaged in different collaborative activities and (e) performed better on one part of the group task. These results demonstrate the potential benefits of visualizing agreement and discussion during CSCL.     

Beyond Expertise Seeking: A Field Study of the Informal Knowledge Practices of Healthcare IT Teams

CSCW has long been concerned with formal and informal knowledge practices in organizations, examining both the social and technical aspects of how knowledge is sought, shared, and used. In this study, we are interested in examining the set of activities that occur when co-located knowledge workers manage and resolve issues by seeking, sharing, and applying their informal knowledge. Informal knowledge seeking involves more than identifying the expert who has the knowledge or accessing the knowledge through physical artifacts. It also involves working with that expert to identify and apply the appropriate knowledge to the particular situation. However, our understandings of how people collaboratively work together to find, share and apply this knowledge are less well understood. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted a field study of how professionals in three IT teams of a regional hospital managed and resolved IT issues. These knowledge workers used various collaborative practices such as creation of ad-hoc teams and the use of email to identify, share, and use informal knowledge to resolve IT issues. In addition, particular team practices such as how issues are assigned affected these knowledge activities. Our findings highlight how informal knowledge activities are affected by a variety of implicit and sometimes subtle features of the organization and that organizational knowledge management systems should support informal knowledge seeking activities and collaboration amongst the knowledge sharers.     

Interaction and Outcomes in Collaborative Storytelling Systems: a Framework,a Field Study,and a Model

In the last decades, advances in interactive information technologies have facilitated collaborative fiction writing, which has become widespread and large-scale. This paper proposes a framework to analyze collaborative storytelling systems, made of a set of parameters divided into six conceptual areas. Four of them relate to the systems and two (process and output) to the results of the collaboration. Through this framework we can study more precisely these different factors of the systems, their interplay, and how they impact the creators’ performance. We also present a controlled extended-duration field study on collaborative storytelling, and we use this framework to comparatively analyze these observations and other relevant experiences in the field of co-creation of shared narrative spaces. As a result, we propose a human-information interaction model for collaborative narrative systems, intended to better support co-creation and address the barriers of this kind of systems turning them into new opportunities for collaboration.     

Technology as small group face-to-face Collaborative Scaffolding

There is a wealth of evidence that collaboration between learners can enhance the outcomes for all concerned. This supports the theorization of learning as a socio-cultural practice, framed by Vygotsky and developed by other researchers such as Rogoff, Lave and Wenger. However, there is also evidence that working collaboratively may not be a spontaneous response to working in a group, and that teaching learners how to collaborate, and in particular how to work together to negotiate meaning, is a necessary part of the process of learning collaboratively which can enhance outcomes further. A question for the computer supported collaborative learning community then arises as to whether learning to collaborate can be scaffolded through the use of digital tools, and what such tools might look like. This paper reports on the design of a digital system that aims to support the practice of face-to-face collaboration on open-ended tasks. Findings from trials of the system in classrooms in the UK and Chile show that the model is welcomed both by teachers and pupils, and met its objectives of ensuring greater interaction between class members who did not normally work together, and involvement of all individuals in discussion based activities.     

Reviewing Practices in Collaborative Writing

This paper presents an interview study in which 11 academics as interviewees participated for the purpose of revealing common collaborative writing practices, with particular focus on reviewing documents. First, we present the findings obtained concerning the issues of co-operating strategies underlying the reviewing process, how people revise their documents and comment on them, what they use the previous revision history for, and to what extent current technology is used in the reviewing process. Second, we also discuss aspects of the design of collaborative writing tools.     

Large-scale coordination: developing a framework to evaluate socio-technical and collaborative issues

Collaborative logistics, logistics-based networks, focused logistics, and distributed adaptive logistics refer to innovative approaches to logistics planning/execution encompassing automated, adaptive technologies, and proactive human collaboration. Because these approaches are collaborative and distributed in nature, they create novel challenges for coordination and collaboration within socio-technical systems, which encompass the collaborative technologies, the people or machines engaged in collaboration, and the social context of collaboration and coordination. The present challenges need to be met by theoretical models incorporating multidisciplinary perspectives in the study of collaboration. The current paper introduces a collaboration framework which may inform the design and implementation of collaborative technologies and systems, to include distributed logistics teams, from a socio-technical perspective.