Notes

Blog post

Key terms:

• notation
• conceptual structures
• making explicit
• conceptually implicit structures
• representational biases
• salience

Key questions:

• how to convert representational biases to representational guidance
• pedagogical implications of representational tools

Important

• notation/tool/artefact difference

• argument maps
• concept maps
• evidence maps
• knowledge maps
• mind maps

They are explicit about some conceptual structure or model

Their notations are for constructing conceptually explicit representational artefacts

• written language
  • far more expressive, but as notation, makes nothing salient
  • one cannot tell “at a glance” the overall argumentative, conceptual, or evidential structure of a text
• graphical node-link tool
  • prompt users to make connections, all new contributions will be related to something else
  • users of an evidence map more likely to talk about evidence (and represent it)
  • statements and evidential relationships will be visually salient, far more likely to be referenced in subsequent discussions
• matrix
  • salience of empty cells that “want to be filled in”

• encourage participants to clarify their thinking (Brna, Cox, & Good, 2001)
• make this thinking visible to others (Bell, 1997)
• provide resources for conversation (Roschelle, 1996)
• can guide students’ argumentation to include disconfirming as well as confirming evidence (Toth, Suthers, & Lesgold, 2002; Veerman, 2003)
• can function as a “convergence artifact” that expresses the group’s emerging consensus (Hewitt, 2001; Suthers, 2001a). p. 1

• medium of communication or a formal record of an argumentation process
• OR resources (stimuli and guides) for conversation (Roschelle, 1996) among co-located learners concerning issues of evidence

If representations are resources for conversation, does it matter which representation one uses? what does this mean - resources as opposed to medium of communication? read Roschelle 1996

• various forms of hypertext/hypermedia (Guzdial et al., 1997; O'Neill & Gomez, 1994; Scardamalia et al., 1992)
• node-link graphs representing rhetorical, logical, or evidential relationships between assertions (Ranney, Schank, & Diehl, 1995; Smolensky, Fox, King, & Lewis, 1987; Suthers & Weiner, 1995)
• containment of evidence within theory boxes (Bell, 1997)
• evidence or criteria matrices (Puntambekar, Nagel, Hübscher, Guzdial, & Kolodner, 1997)

Constraints: limits on expressiveness, for example, the representational system may provide limited types of objects and relations and structures that can be constructed from them (Stenning & Oberlander, 1995)

Salience: how the notation makes certain types of information (such as conceptual relationships) visible, possibly at the expense of others (Larkin & Simon, 1987; Lohse, 1997). The absence of information where it is expected is also a form of salience (e.g., the empty cells of a matrix suggest that they might be filled).

These play out in many ways, including influences on individual (cognitive/perceptual) reasoning and learning (e.g., Kotovsky & Simon, 1990; Novick & Hmelo, 1994; Zhang, 1997)

The representations have influences on collaborative processes. Which of these are intrinsic to the collaborative processes, rather than due to being aggregated influence of representations on individuals? Three possible answers (Suthers & Hundhausen, 2003; Suthers, 2006b):

Multiple participants can change an artefact, feel obliged to negotiate and get agreement on modifications.

Any medium has potential for action (affordances) - the ideas associated with these potential actions are more likely to be discussed in the course of this negotiation. Notational constraints limit but focus these negotiation potentials, while salience makes them more likely to be taken up by participants.

interesting link between affordances and salience

People construct representations together, elements of the representation becomes imbued with meanings for the participants by virtue of having been produced through the negotiation mentioned above.

This works for collaboration with quite small granularity, but what about for example Knowledge Forum, where you might not have been part of all the construction? Or larger granularities? How can you help imbue meaning to representations for people who did not directly partake in the construction? Replay of Etherpad, screencasts with "narration"?

This shared history is available to participants through language, gesture (deixis??), or direct manipulation of the artefact. This leads to subsequent negotiations, increasing elaboration on previous conceptions and conceptual complexity that can be handled in group interactions - again focused by constraints and salience.

Wonder if memory constraints are relevant here

Computational media can foster group awareness - presence of others might influence your choice of actions (Kreijns & Kirschner, 2004; Erickson & Kellogg, 2000). Information about “attentional status of group members” and attitudes to ideas may influence actions of individuals.

How does this affect the collaboration, or learning? Should read the two papers listed.

This is based on short laboratory studies, but (Suthers, Toth & Weiner 1997; Toth et al 2002) developed comprehensive method for implementing Belvedere-supported collaborative inquiry in classroom

Students were provided with rubrics at the outset and told to use them during activity. There appears to be a synergistic effect between effective representations and guidelines for their use. (cf Tabak 2004).

The forms of guidance included Belvedere’s graphical representations of evidential relations, and assessment rubrics. The Belvedere graphs relate data and hypothesis objects (represented by distinct shapes) with consistency and inconsis- tency relations (represented by links labeled “+” and “-”). p. 6

Too much prompting, wanting to fill in as many cells as possible, thus including weak relationships. Once cells have been filled in, ignoring them - not critically assessing them.

Many studies show degradation of problem solving performance and interpersonal communication due to reduced modes of interaction (Doerry 1996, Olson & Olson 2000). Other studies show people can compensate for or even benefit from restricted interaction (Burgoon et al 2002; Herring 1999).

Opposite hypotheses:

• visual representations play less role, because people cannot as easily refer to them, also lack of co-presence
• or visual representations will play a greater role, because participants will make use of them to make up for the reduced bandwidth of chat tool as compared to speech

Finding:

• greater proportion of communicative acts happen in the graphical representation - shift of role from object of discourse to medium of discourse
• online introduced new ideas directly into graph medium more often than face-to-face, who would discuss it first
• chat mainly used for social banter and task management

Difficult with deixis:

• in face-to-face, mainly spatial (at any time, refer to any object)
• online, often temporal: what do you think about what I just edited?

Direct manipulation of graph is “first order”, also need “higher order” discussion about what it means etc. Danger that online discourse becomes less reflective, because the more expressive and reflective mode of interaction - chat - focuses on recent (temporally indexed) items, while easiest means of reintroducing prior information is through direct manipulation.

Solution:

• designers give users better ways of spatially referring (inserting pointers in chat, like MathForum)
• system facilitates dealing with old information, for example redisplay of prior information with reflection prompts after a period

Positive * the lack of time-pressure in discussion forums may support more reflective contributions than synchronous communication (e.g., Hawkes & Romiszowski, 2001)

Negtive: online interaction can suffer from incoherence due to

• the violation of adjacency conventions for topic maintenance (Herring, 1999)
• the coarse granularity of referencing (Reyes & Tchounikine, 2003)
• a lack of convergence due to the intrinsically divergent representations used in threaded discussion (Hewitt, 2001)
• a bias towards addressing recently posted messages (Hewitt, 2003)
• the shared knowledge being constructed is not made explicit by typical CMC tools, and hence it is difficult to find relevant contributions, place one’s own contribution in the relevant context, or quickly assess the outcome of the discussion (Suthers, 2001a; Turoff, Hiltz, Bieber, Fjermestad, & Rana, 1999).

Conceptual development of conversation can be made explicit, and each contribution can be referenced to a component of the conceptual representation.

• interactional coherence may improve, because the conceptual relevance of each contribution is clear.
• convergence may improve, because multiple contributions referencing a given topic are collected together

• they are different
  • conversation relies on regularity in adjacency and focus shifts for coherence (Grosz & Sidner, 1986; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974)
  • conceptualizations may be organized according to diverse ways of modeling or systematizing knowledge
• so separate tools can allow designers to optimize for distinct needs and explicit referencing can be used to tie the two together

Turn towards study of practices of individual and intersubjective meaning-making through which learning is ultimately accomplished. Sequential analyses of interaction more appropriate for understanding how cognitive and social affordances of technologies such as knowledge maps are appropriated by participants as well as influencing their participation.

System designers should treat representational design as design of resources for conversation between learners.

A designer or teacher might ask:

• What activities does a given representational notation suggest or prompt for?
• Do the actions that can be performed on a shared representation in this notation correspond to the potential ideas that we want learners to negotiate and distinctions we want them to attend to?
• Do the resulting representations express and make salient the ideas and relationships that learners should revisit and relate to new information?
• Are the needs that should be addressed by subsequent activity, such the lack of information, made obvious?
• Do the representations capture important aspects of learners’ thinking and expose conflicts between alternative solutions or perspectives?
• Stepping beyond the scope of the studies reported here, one might ask: does the notation provide the preferred vocabularies and representational perspectives that constitute both the target skill to be learned as an aspiring member of a community, and focus learning activity on ways of approaching a problem that are productive?

Does this mean that it would be useful to develop a range of different tools, or even tools that were configurable by teachers, to suit different instructional methods and subject areas -- a very different approach from the "one-size-fits-all" of for example Knowledge Forum. Is there a link here to "visual literacy"? Graphical representation literacy? Being exposed to a number of different representations - and perhaps also learning to use these actively in the learning. Link to personal use of mind mapping and other tools. Meta-awareness. Does it change the learner's approach to the tools if he/she is meta-aware of the constraints or salience?