Notes

Blog post

• collaborative knowledge building
• group and personal perspectives
• mediation by artifacts
• micro-analysis of conversation

• learning is everywhere, even non-conscious activity can reinforce tacit competences
• learning is never seen, only the consequences of learning can be observed, often statistically insignificant (Russell 1999)

• more concrete and descriptive
• favor social practice view
• refers to specific, identifiable occurrences (cases are relatively rare in real life)
• one can directly and empirically observe the knowledge being built, because it necessarily takes place in observable media
• produces knowledge objects or artifacts, lasting evidence and basis for evaluating the KB

Emphasize the construction and further development of a knowledge object that is shared by the group or “community of learners.” Not personal learning by the participants, however they will retain some of what the group discovered, deepen their collaboration skills and enjoy positive experiences of inquiry and intellectual engagement.

• Progressive inquiry - dates back to analyses of problem solving by Dewey and Pierce
• interrogative model of inquiry (Hakkarainen & Sintonen, 2001) based on an analysis of types of questioning according to the philosophy of science (e.g., Popper, Kuhn, Hintikka)

• a systematic approach to having groups of students pursue the posing and investigation of knowledge building questions (Barrows, 1994).
• tries to cover the breadth of a domain (such as medical education) – in addition to the depth gained through explorative inquiry – by providing a carefully designed set of cases as problems to be pursued consecutively
• a form of the case-based method (Collins & Stevens, 1983), but one which requires the student group to become self-reliant investigators, with the teacher or tutor only facilitating the small-group process.
• a specific approach to project-based learning (Blumenfeld et al., 1991), in which a group of students conducts a project.

A potential issue with project-based activities that do not adhere to a model like PBL is that tasks often get divided up so that participants cooperate (as opposed to collaborate) on the over-all project but do not collaborate on the knowledge building; they may subsequently share their individual expertise through jigsawing (Brown & Campione, 1994), but the basic knowledge building takes place outside the group interaction

Difference between artifact being the goal and learning being the goal

Collaborative knowledge has to be externalized to be shared, this provides material for a researcher. Specifically, it necessarily involves the use of concepts whose meaning is continually changing and growing, and a trained observer can (given the time and tools) observe how knowledge was built up step by step.

Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) stresses that the meaning of a communicative context is established interactively and is achieved by the participants creating a social order “on the fly.” That is, the meaning of individual utterances is not given by some preconceived ideas represented in the speaker’s mind or from her personal perspective, which are then expressed and conveyed in verbal symbols. Rather, the meaning of the utterances is negotiated by the speaking and responding parties; it exists only in the group perspective that is formed by the intertwining of personal perspectives in the communicative interaction itself.

The meaning of a specific utterance may be defined and affected by subsequent utterances, responses, gestures, pauses, repairs, etc. (Sacks, 1992).

The elements of this kind of interaction analysis have been developed on a rigorous methodological basis by the theory of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and the science of conversation analysis (CA) (Sacks, 1992). With the availability of digital video to capture and facilitate detailed analysis of naturally occurring interpersonal interaction, the CA approach has been combined with the study of gesture, gaze, bodily orientation, etc. into techniques for interpreting detailed behavior known as micro-ethnography (LeBaron & Streeck, 2000; Streeck, 1983).

Requires a lot of effort to trace and analyze knowledge building discourse. Ways of doing this automatically or semi-automatically. If it can be done instantly, even at a low level of granularity, it can also enable agents and scripts to interact with the learning situation.

The concept of artifact is perhaps most familiar in anthropology, where it refers to discovered objects that were made by ancient people and that still display traces of their intended function or symbolic import.

The social basis of knowledge is deeply rooted. It is not just a matter of artifacts in the world extending the limited short-term memory of individual minds, like notes scattered about as external memory traces (Hutchins, 1996; Norman, 1993).

When artifacts are created, their meaning is shared and relatively accessible.

The artifact functions importantly to

• capture
• formulate
• encapsulate

that meaning.

But the meaning does not remain simply available on the surface of the artifact. Do artifacts “embody meaning” or do they embody meaningful traces of human activity? … Meaning is not “in” the artifact; rather it is “in” the total situation that includes artifacts, minds and social practices.

The meaningful traces transform, reify, distort and hide the meanings that originally existed in the live human interactions. New minds who encounter the artifacts must recreate the appropriate social practices, reconstruct the cultural contexts and rediscover the meaning within their own personal and group perspectives.

Is this related to the problem of understanding a mind map or concept map when you were not involved in the creation?

The task of education in this approach is to revive meanings that have been captured and preserved in artifacts. This is the problem of cultural transmission. Culture can be conceptualized as a body of cognitive and other artifacts. In literate society, for instance, culture includes systems of numbers and written language. Schooling is largely the attempt to help young students to internalize the vast repertoire of meaning that has been associated with these artifacts.

Although it is often possible for individuals who have mastered certain skills (cognitive artifacts) to develop related knowledge artifacts on their own, it is at other times useful to recreate the intersubjective conditions of knowledge creation in carefully structured contexts of collaboration with well-designed mediational artifacts to scaffold further learning. Within CSCL efforts, this would mean designing software to support the right kinds of interpersonal interaction, of mediation by artifacts and of knowledge artifact construction.

Vygotsky (1930/1978; 1934/1986) wanted to supplement Marx’s social theory with a psychology of mediated cognition (a perspective on the individual as intertwined with the group perspective). He extended the notion of physical artifact (tool) to encompass linguistic artifacts (symbols) as well. The individual’s activity was then seen to be mediated by both varieties of artifact. The human ability to use physical and linguistic artifacts is a cultural development that allowed mankind to evolve beyond its biological basis.

We can call the internalized result of discussion of learning in a student’s “zone of proximal development,” scaffolded by a teacher, a “cognitive artifact.” For instance, a work group might develop a list of tasks or a diagram of a work flow on a white board and a member of the group might then internalize and later mentally recall that list or diagram in order to monitor future work. The internal mental representation is then a cognitive artifact that resulted from group knowledge building and that may mediate subsequent knowledge building by the individual or the group. In this analysis, the mental representation is a result of collaborative activities and did not first arise subjectively to then be expressed externally. (The deconstruction of artifacts often shows that things developed in the opposite order from how they now appear – that is characteristic of the reification of meaning in an artifact.)

If we adopt a Vygotskian view of mediation by artifacts, then the knowledge building process can be conceptualized as the construction of knowledge artifacts, involving physical and symbolic artifacts as starting point, as medium and as product. The process proceeds collaboratively and intersubjectively, within a socio-cultural context. The final knowledge artifact may be internalized by one or more of the participants. While the internalized learning outcomes may be problematic to assess, the shared understanding within the collaborative knowledge building is experienced by the participants and may be subject to reconstruction from traces left in various artifacts, including video recordings and their transcripts.

Anything like a theory of knowledge building must pay due regard and respect to essential roles of both collaborative groups and their individual members.

• symbols, representations and artifacts are only meaningful to individal minds
• interpretation is carried out by individuals, within horizons of personal perspectives (Gadamer 1960/1988)
• isolated from social interaction, physical artifacts and historical cultures, human brains are poor thinkers and could never have developed into powerful minds (Donald, 1991).
• it can be argued that modern minds are simply collections of cognitive artifacts internalized from inter-personal interactions (Vygotsky, 1930/1978)

“Mediation” means that something happens by means of, or through the involvement of, a mediating object.

For instance, when a student uses a technical term to construct knowledge or when a class of students uses a software collaboration system to discuss a theme, that term or that system is mediating the activity: It is providing a medium or middle ground through which the students interact with their ideas. The specific form of the mediation generally affects the nature of the activity profoundly, often determining the nature of the task itself, that is, the choice of medium can define the ends or goal as well as the possible means. In Roschelle’s example, the metaphor of pulling mediated the students’ knowledge building and allowed them to formulate a theory, to share their understanding of how the simulation worked, to bring their bodily skills to bear, and to solve some but not all of the challenges posed by the teacher.

• WebGuide
• SimRocket
• BSCL