Discovery of dissonance or gaps in understanding the inconsistency among ideas, concepts, or statements, (3) negotiation of meaning or co-construction of knowledge, (4) Testing and modification of proposed synthesis or co-construction, and (5) Agreement or applications of newly constructed knowledge. Figure 4.4 shows the changes of the five phases over the sessions.
KB outcomes [main phases] Session 2
Session 3
Session 4
Session 5
Session 7
Session 7b
Session 8
Session 9
Session 6
70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 PHASE01
PHASE02
PHASE03
PHASE04
PHASE05
Figure 4.5. Frequency count of notes at different phases of interaction for different sessions As expected, overall, the graphs show a progressive decline from Phase 1 to Phase 5. This trend occurs because sharing and comparing information (Phase 1) to reveal gaps or dissonance (Phase 2) takes greater time than acceptance of new knowledge (Phase 5). Negotiation of meaning (Phase 3) follows from Phase 2 leading to testing of new ideas (Phase 4) and finally acceptance of newly constructed knowledge (Phase 5). Learners generally spend less time in each progressive phase, hence the downward trend in Figure 4.5. That said, iterative changes and the knowledge coconstruction may not progress in a liner fashion. Among the sessions, 7a and 7b showed slightly different trends where it peaked at Phase 3 (negotiation of meaning) which is higher than Phase 1 (sharing or comparing information) and 2 (discovering gaps). The topics discussed in 7a and 7b are “principles of knowledge”, which relates to the design principles of knowledge building. It lasted two sessions because there were 12 principles to discuss. By this time, learners had already experienced knowledge building for more than 7 weeks and were very active in the online discussions. Examining the content of the discourse, it is apparent that they already knew the list of the principles and had already discovered some of the dissonance or gaps. For example, the group leading the discussion started with the question “What are some practical ways of preventing KF from becoming an information “bulletin board?" This is already a question stating the dissonance. Learners had also moved quickly to implementation issues, such as the roles of educators in knowledge building. Some were also aware of the use of analytics by the educator to examine the class’ discourse, and such applications were also discussed. In short, learners had sufficient experience and fundamental knowledge about knowledge building and were ready to discuss more advanced issues related to knowledge building. Session 4 also shows a similar trend as 7a and 7b. The topic for Session 4 was “Affordances of CSCL”. Some of the learners have learnt about the concept of “affordances” in a previous course, and had moved the discussion quickly to more in-depth issues such as context-dependency of affordances and differences between affordances and constraints. Because of this, we saw a peak of Phase 3. Unlike the case of Session 7a and 7b, not all learners were as familiar with the topic of affordances, and therefore we saw a similar peak of discussion at Phase 2 (gaps and dissonance).
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