Task 1
CSCL group work with the Norwegian Students
Josmar Hilde Mikkel, Redentine
CSCL is a field of study about understanding how people learn, particularly in school environments, and ways of designing our educational system to ensure an effective learning process. CSCL emerged due to a number of factors:
Proposed instructional theories including ‘Learning by Discovery’ (Shulman & Keister, 1966), ‘Open Classroom Learning’ (Kohl, 1969), ‘Experiential Learning’ (Kolb, 1984) and ‘Inquiry based Learning’ (Bateman, 1990). As Koschmann (1996) explained, all these learning theories reflect that learning occurs through personal inquiry and discovery.
The skills acquired by a ‘Knowledge Based Society’ which includes the ability to work in teams (collaboration).
Technology advancement that has led to the development of web based educational tools such as shared spaces where teachers/students can store and share information online and other tools that allows distant and non verbal communication that are nowadays used in any educational and workplace setting
There are many approaches to CSCL. They can be divided into two main approaches. The two approaches involve groups of students working together. A method of teaching that most teachers tend to enjoy using in class as it involves collaboration and discussion among the group. A method which involves a very important aspect which is also involved in CSCL, the students taking roles in collaborating while the teacher/tutor is being in the background and instead of making the students memorize and learn facts, they need to do tasks together to find the knowledge. However, all this depends on the age, enthusiasm, morality and will of students. In their articles “Approaching institutional contexts: systemic versus dialogic research in CSCL” and “Computer-supported collaborative learning: Basic concepts, multiple perspectives, and emerging trends”, Arnseth and Ludvigsen, and Ludvigsen and Mørch, refer to these two different approaches to researching CSCL: the systemic approach and the dialogic approach. Where the systemic approach would tend to focus more on the cognitive aspects of CSCL, the dialogic approach will focus more on the socio-cultural aspects. The systemic approach is generally about the creation of models that show how specific features of a technological system either support or does not support collaboration, reasoning, knowledge representation and structure of discourse. The models try to show to what extent these features will enhance students’ capacities to solve problems in different domains. The users of the systemic approach analyze an individually acting and thinking agent’s two specific cognitive processes, internalization and transfer, i.e. the approach focuses on the learning of an individual person (Ludvigsen & Mørch, 2009). An influential approach used in Systemic approach is the Knowledge Building which involves a 'scientific inquiry' process (problem identification, proposing personal theories or hypotheses, experimentation, critical evaluation, data interpretation, scientific explanation and summarizing). Through my teaching experience such an approach is not successful with students who are new to the subject being studied as they cannot incur their own ‘scientific inquiry’ process. Thus, using a scaffolding approach with CSCL is one way to tackle such an issue. This will aid the students to:
Get acquainted with the subject so eventually they build the necessary knowledge foundation of the problem being tackled. This was also emphasized by Linell (1998), as ‘Task Conceptualization’, when the students understand the task before starting working on it (Koschmann, 1996). Ludvigsen & Mørch (2009), added that this should be considered as a learning activity per se as this kick starts the premise from where the students should start working on.
Then students, as a group, can collaborate and generate their own inquiry which will proceed to a positive learning experience. Ludvigsen & Mørch (2009: p.5) added that a systemic approach is fruitful when scaffolding is based on the cognitive process like “...hypothesis generation, data interpretation and scientific explanation”.
Ludvigsen and Mørch state that even though the systemic approach gives useful guidelines for how we can build scaffolds for cognitive processes, that to provide a full account of CSCL, this model-based approach to learning and cognition needs to be supplemented by a situated approach from a social and cultural perspective (Ludvigsen & Mørch, 2009). This is where they find the dialogic approach to be rewarding. They base the approach on the idea that learning is a socially organized activity, much like the socio-cultural approach to learning. A group of persons, students or teachers, interacting to achieve a mutual goal is in this approach the unit of analysis, and concepts as mediation, artefacts and social practice are central (Ludvigsen & Mørch, 2009). When tried in schools, this kind of activity resulted in that when students are faced with tasks to build something together where they can socialize, meet and discuss, they would most of the times enjoy more doing the task than if they were given a task where they just cooperate together, leading to better understanding of the topic as they share the information together. The dialogic approach involves the use of social interaction among the group. It requires, as Wegerif (1999) referred to, ‘Exploratory Talk'. This involves reflective thoughts and collaboration of ideas among the students. As Doise & Mugry in “CSCL: Theory and Practice of an Emerging Paradigm” (Koschmann 1996: p. 11) emphasised about the “importance of peerinteraction for cognitive development”. This results in an increase in creativity and less plagiarism when students cooperated together. The different approaches influencing CSCL can be further enhanced and elaborated with the use of technological tools, hence the name CSCL. The use of technology as a mediating artefact affects the interaction between students. So good use of this mediating artifact should aid the students in their learning process, otherwise it can actually distract the students from collaborating together. We are living in a changing world, a paradigm shift towards new means for working, learning and teaching. While contrasting our own experiences in collaborating together while using web based tools, we encountered several hitches that must be addressed in order to have a smooth learning process. Such problems were the connectivity issues that impeded us to work together at times and this required a lot of wasted time to solve. When computers are supposed to be the mediating artefact it is vital that they actually work as intended to.
References: Hans Christian Arnseth & Sten Ludvigsen. 2005. «Approaching institutional contexts: systemic versus 4 dialogic research in CSCL» Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Ludvigsen, Sten R. and Mørch, Anders I. 2010. «Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: Basic Concepts, Multiple Perspectives, and Emerging Trends» The International Encyclopedia of Education. Timoty Koschman «Paradigm shifts in instructional Technology: An Introduction» in Koschmann, T. (Ed.). (1996). CSCL: Theory and Practice of an Emerging Paradigm. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.