510

What are the relevant design affordances that shape how learning happens in a wiki?

Everyone can build on each other’s contribution in wikis. Papert (1984) eluded to this when he described a fragmented learning process in Logo which allowed students to share bits of knowledge which led them to reaching goals collaboratively. Well edited wiki entries are reviewed and discussed by a number of people which increases its accuracy. However, there is still debate over whether or not the input by the collective is correct or not. Another affordance is the open access to current knowledge because people are regularly updating the pages.

How could we provide a kind of critical media literacy that would assist students’ to evaluate the quality of knowledge – both their own, and the knowledge retrieved from online sources, or textbooks?

In a radio interview, Jimmy Wales (2005) said that students shouldn’t be citing Wikipedia or any other in academic papers. He goes on to say that we need courses that teach students how to recognize valid sources and think critically about where the information is coming from. Cummings (2009), who asked his university students to write for Wikipedia, defined this as a teachable moment. Personally, the Research Methodology course in the MET Program has helped me evaluate whether a source is reputable or not. This includes peer reviewed articles that should be credible but have faulty methodology or logic.

Cummings (2009) and Beasley-Murray (2008) encouraged their students to evaluate the quality of their own knowledge by writing for Wikipedia. The publication of their writings motivated their students to produce accurate work. Students made revisions based on feedback from other Wikipedia editors. Their work was more meaningful to them than simply handing in a paper or writing an exam and receiving a mark.

How would you assess the quality of students’ own contributions in a wiki?

Firstly, I would give explicit instructions on my expectations for the wiki. For example, instead of groups of students splitting a wiki page into parts, I would instruct students to build the page collaboratively. I would evaluate students’ contributions to a wiki with a self assessment where students would write about the improvements they made to the wiki and why. I would also use the history function to compare the newest revision to the old version for significant improvements.

How can arguments about the quality of knowledge impact educational decisions about appropriate media usage?

Arguments about the quality of knowledge encourage people to reflect on what is appropriate to use as credible sources. Perhaps, discussions like these will help us redefine what is credible and what is not.

I think it’s important for people to read multiple sources before making an informed decision about a topic. I think Wikipedia can be used for everyday questions or serve as a “general introduction to a topic” (Cummings, 2009). However, currently, I would only use primary sources from peer reviewed literature in an academic paper.

Papert, S. (1984). New theories for new learning. School Psychology Review, 13(4), 422-428. Retrieved from: https://www.vista.ubc.ca/webct/RelativeResourceManager/Template/PDF/S%20Papert_New%20Theories%20for%20New%20Learnings.pdf

Cummings, R. (2009, March 12). Are We Ready to Use Wikipedia to Teach Writing? Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/03/12/cummings

Giles, J. (2005). Special Report: Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature, 438, 900-901. doi: 10.1038/438900a

Beasley-Murray, J. (2008). Was introducing Wikipedia to the classroom an act of madness leading only to mayhem if not murder? Retrieved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jbmurray/Madness

Wales, J. (2005). Wikipedia, Open Source and the Future of the Web. NPR. Retrieved from: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4986453&ft=1&f=1019

I am going to relate the following questions to our Design Project for this course. We created a social network for teenagers to encourage discussion about bullying.

How intuitively easy to use is the technology by both students and teachers?

I think the project is very intuitive for students to use because it is designed similar to social media that they are familiar with. It links to accounts we created on facebook, twitter, flickr etc. so they can participate in our project by using their existing social media accounts. After reading Bates and Poole (2003), I was concerned about how complicated the site would be for teachers to manage. Teachers with social media experience should have no problem but otherwise the site could be intimidating. However, our site has a variety of tasks to choose from so that more advanced members are still engaged and inexperienced members are not overwhelmed. For example, the former might create a blog on our site and then link to a mind map that shows their definition of bullying. The latter might post a comment about a video embedded in our site. Bates and Poole (2003) say that if students and teachers are motivated enough, they will learn to use the technology. Perhaps, the students could take a leadership role and help the teachers learn the technology.

How reliable is the technology?

We used Ning.com to create our network. They claim to be the “world’s largest platform for creating social websites.” Ning was launched in 2005. Over 2 million Ning networks have been created since then. Therefore, it is a stable company that is not likely to go our of business in the near future.

How easy is it to maintain and upgrade the technology?

The technology is maintained for us since our site is hosted with Ning. We are able to upgrade our plan by paying a higher fee. Ning used to be free but recently started charging their clients a small fee for their sites. A downside to being hosted by Ning is that we will have to comply with any future price hikes if we want to maintain our network.

Do you have adequate technical and professional support, both in terms of the technology and with respect to the design of materials?

Ning has a FAQ page, help videos, and a support forum. In order to email a Ning representative directly, we’d need to upgrade our account. Other sites we’ve connected to like facebook, twitter, bubbl.us etc. provide adequate technical support as well.

Do any of the categories or questions provide you with insights concerning the implementation of educational technology in your local context (school district, university or private organization)?

My main concern with the implementation of a Ning network in my district is about privacy issues. We can moderate any photos, blog posts, and video that our members upload but we can’t control inappropriate content they see on twitter, flickr, or facebook. There is danger that students might leave the accounts we created on these sites and wander onto pages not condoned by their school. I’m not sure what types of school filters and/or rules are put on these sites across the schools in my district. We put a disclaimer on our site for teachers that they should send a permission letter home to parents describing the site and possibility of coming across undesirable content.

Bates and Poole. (2003) “A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology.”  In Effective Teaching with Technology. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Pages 75-105.

Ning Inc. (2010) Retrieved from: www.ning.com

Consider what Anderson means when he describes the attributes of learning in terms of being learner, knowledge-, assessment- and community-centred. How might we use technology if we are thinking about creating learning environments that exemplify these attributes?

We should not rely on traditional teaching methods when integrating technology into the classroom. It isn’t the technology itself that is improving student learning and motivation but the affordances that the technology allows. Shank (1993) as cited by Anderson suggests that technology allows students to make their own meaning by guiding their own learning (as cited by Anderson, 2008).

I found it interesting that Anderson (2008, p. 47) described learner centred contexts as meeting “the needs of the teacher, the institution, and of the larger society that provides support for the student, the institution, and often for a group or class of students, as well as for the particular needs of individual learners. When we are considering implementing technology in class, we can refer to this quote which leads to questions like:

• Does the teacher need professional development?
• Does the technology fit within the schools budget?
• Can the school maintain and update the technology in the future?
• Is there IT support?
• Will the students learn useful skills from using this technology?
• Does the technology build upon students’ prior learning?
• Can students direct their own learning with this technology?

The vastness of the Internet is overwhelming. Therefore, knowledge-centred online learning provides appropriate content at just the right time along the learning journey. This means providing enough content for ideal learning to occur but not too much that drowns the learner (Anderson, 2008).

The focus of assessment should be “to motivate, inform, and provide feedback to both learners and teachers” (Anderson, 2008, p.49). This would mean going beyond marks by reporting on progress and suggesting ways to encourage learning. Assessment should be the responsibility of the community of learners with self and peer assessments as well as teacher feedback.

Community centred learning replaces competition with collaboration. Students have much to gain from the “expertise of peers and external experts (Anderson, 2008, p. 49) Technology can improve upon classroom discourse by breaking time and space boundaries. Thus, a community of online learners has the potential to be very diverse which would offer a multitude of perspectives to challenge each others’ thinking about particular concepts. Discussion boards allow for students to reflect meaningfully and participate as often as they like. Public postings of assignments follows the notion that “two heads are better than one” where students build new knowledge together instead of replicating the same response.

What kinds of interaction will we need to create?

“The greatest affordance of the Web for education is the profound and multifaceted increase in communication and interaction capability” (Anderson, 2008, p. 54). Anderson (2008) refers to three common interactions in distance education as discussed by Micheal Moore (as cited by Christenson & Menzel, 1998) which were: interactions:student-student; student-teacher and student-content Anderson then added: teacher-teacher, teacher-content, and content-content interaction (Anderson & Garrison, 1988).

Examples of Interactions

-student-student – student-led teams present learning outcomes in project format

-student-teacher – teacher welcomes students

-student-content – “immersion in micro-environments, exercises in virtual labs, and online computer-assisted learning tutorials” (Anderson, 2008, p. 58).

-teacher-teacher – professional development opportunities

-teacher-content – updating content based on course evaluations

-content-content – tagging and RSS feeds

And how might our networks extend the contexts into which our educational institutions reach beyond the traditional and isolated space of the classroom?

Wilson (1997) as cited by Anderson (2008, p. 51) states that online communities create a “shared sense of belonging, trust, expectation of learning, and commitment to participate in and contribute to the community.” Online communities allow all members to participate equally whereas certain personality types may be overbearing in the traditional classroom. As stated previously, these networks may be culturally diverse, thereby contributing multiple perspectives. Students can instantly access an array of online resources and experts to draw upon. Overall, online learning has the potential to be more effective because it allows students to engage at a deeper level after mindful reflection about the topic.

Anderson, T. (2008). “Towards and Theory of Online Learning.” In Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University.

After reading Gee (2003) and de Castell and Jenson (2003) this week, I see playing games in a different light. Now, I appreciate the problem solving skills, sense of community, and decision making opportunities that game worlds provide. Last year, I played online games with my students, thinking a “game” would motivate them. These games were primarily for math and grammar practice. I think the games did engage them at the beginning because it was something different but they were surface games that didn’t connect the players to something bigger or allow them to create their own meaning. My students love Club Penguin, Poptropica, and Webkinz. All three games seem to have a culture surrounding them where the games are “talked about, read about, ‘cheated’, fantasized about” as de Castell and Jenson (2003, p. 651) describe. That’s part of the reason why I wanted to see what the hype was all about.

Each game allows you to create an avatar that puts you in a gaming environment where you can choose your own adventure, play mini-games, and talk to other players.

What aspects of the design produce an engagement that feels like immersion?

I felt immersed in Clube Penguin because I was able to participate fully and navigate my penguin through a world composed of various buildings and outdoor activities. There was more exploration opportunity in Poptropica than in the other games. I felt that Poptropica had an addictive quality that would cause me to think about the game when I wasn’t playing (if I was younger). I was a little disappointed that Webkinz didn’t offer the same freedom as the other two. I was able to decorate my own room for my pet but I didn’t feel as connected to other players or able to explore a world around me. However, in order to keep my pet alive, I am suppose to feed it and exercise it everyday which would keep me coming back to the game.

How does design create links with specific narratives?

Poptropica was more game like because I felt like I had a quest even though I wasn’t always sure of what that was. I created my own narrative for Club Penguin as I moved from building to building to play mini-games. Both Poptropica and Club Penguin had other players who would give me information about what to do. I know some people who work for Club Penguin so I know that these are actual employees who are paid to play the game and act as tour guides. The mission in Webkinz is just to keep my pet alive. I was disappointed with Webkinz because it focused a lot on purchasing credits to decorate my room and buy things for my pet which, I thought, encourages materialism.

How does design create links with specific feelings?

Poptropica was the most exciting game because I was on an adventure collecting items and performing activities that would lead me to beat the level or island that I was on. It had a sense of mystery and challenge. Webkinz capitalized on my mothering instincts to keep my pet safe. Any emotion felt on Club Penguin was in response to conversation I had with the other players

How does design create links with specific knowledges, communities, and/or skills

Both Club Penguin and Poptropica provided online communities that enabled “solidarity beyond/outside the game (chat rooms, bulletin boards, etc.” (De Castell & Jenson, p.655) I felt like I was producing my own meaning as I directed my avatar throughout these games. On Club Penguin, I felt like a bit of an outsider due to my correct spelling and punctuation use. Gee (2003) mentions this as he describes semiotic domains that have identifiable practices, patterns, and behaviours.

Webkinz could teach young children about how to look after another life form but I think there’s other online environments/activities that do a better job of this.

The mini-games embedded in all three games required a range of simple to complex problem solving skills.

How does design mediate interactivity in this game?

Each game encouraged communication amongst the players usually though a chat function. Club Penguin and Poptropica used other players as guides to help me through the game. Club Penguin was the only game that allowed me to type what I wanted instead of choosing from some standardized message. All three games allowed me to invite other players to compete in a mini game with me.

de Castell, Suzanne, & Jenson, Jennifer. (2003). Serious play. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 35(6), 649-665.

Gee, J. (2003). Semiotic domains: Is playing video games a “waste of time? Chapter in: What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave.

Web 2.0 applications like blogs, bookmark sites, games, wikis etc. allow a diverse group of participants to collaborate and support each other on different levels. These groups are reshaping the online community. Like a community of practice, it is the activity that brings the participants together who share a common understanding of their goal. Web 2.0’s primary principles of openness and inclusion (Alexander, 2006) appeals to members who innately have a desire to belong to a group. The knowledge that is gained from the Web 2.0 or a community of practice is the result of the collective and not an individual member. Both a community of practice and the Web 2.0 are continually adapting to the actions of its members.

My learning context primarily supports teacher-led instruction with pockets of student centred learning. Inclusion, participation, collaboration, and peer-to-peer sharing are valued. Sadly, I can’t say that “deep learning” is always taking place. I am on a journey of learning how to establish an environment that encourages consistent knowledge building. I am beginning to see how to overcome the obstacles in the system that have prevented deep learning from regularly taking place. Being in the MET program has given me the confidence and understanding to create a more authentic learning environment in my classroom.

One reason why it is important for me to be confident in using 21rst century teaching methods is so that I can defend my practices to parents and other teachers. Another obstacle is creating problems or projects that will motivate my students and meet learning objectives. Time and collaboration with other like minded teachers would help me reorganize my curriculum.

Alexander, B. (2006). Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning? Educause Review, 41(2),  32-44

The web 2.0 construct provides us with an interesting way into the question at-hand – What kinds of tools offer the greatest opportunity for leveraging critical design elements towards the goal of designing environments that nurture collective intelligence? As Bryan Alexander points out, the term itself embodies a particular version of the history of the Web – one that makes a strong claim about a paradigmatic shift in how we interact in digital, networked spaces. Educators have taken notice of the social software design features that cluster in the web 2.0 construct, and it is these aspects that deserve our full attention.

A line of reasoning that is very much in synch with the web 2.0 construct, which is taken up substantively by the New London Group, is concerned with the gap between the design of learning spaces in schools versus workplaces. These authors argue that established trends in workplace and organizational learning (that can be attributed to the impacts of globalization, and networked mobilities) which educational designers need to pay attention to, include:  diversity as asset (rather than liability), proliferation of communication channels and related literacies, climate of rapid change and flexibility, teamwork and increased importance of collaborative work skills, multiskilled workers, constant on-the-job learning, hybrid forms of communication with a renewed attention to post-literate forms of “secondary orality” (Ong, 1971).

We are going to look, here, then, at how contemporary, networked media spaces are being designed, explicitly, to promote “collective intelligence” (Levy, 1997), which we will define here as tools that nurture: participation, serious play, a perpetual state of tinkering (learning etc…), microcontent authoring and improvement by community members, social networking that is linked with content authoring, and content authoring that has mobility across sites and tools, by mean of tagging, and other forms of annotation.

Participation

Web 2.0 applications are sometimes described as “social software”, highlighting the key role of design features that allow users to add value to a site by means of their active participation, which could take the form of tagging, adding or editing content, commenting, ranking content, linking etc… This functionality has prompted media analysts to consider the ways in which participatory designs contribute to the democratization of knowledge production on the Web. Clay Shirky talks about the transformation of everyday participation in collaborative writing projects, like blogging, as a process of “mass amateurization” that significantly shifts the historically venerated location of experts and the power of established practices of publishing conglomerates

Serious play

In spaces where consumers are also creators, the bar for participation is lowered. Collaborative work environments foster active engagement, with a more egalitarian mode of interaction than is often the case in formal learning spaces. As Bryan Alexander argues, the unit of productive activity in web 2.0 environments is not “the page” or “the finished product”, but rather, “microcontent”, which refers to the typically restricted scope of content generated by participants. And so in Wikipedia, an author can change a single word in an existing article, or on a blog, can post a comment, rather than contributing an entire blog entry. This attribute of contemporary, networked, digital spaces enables meaningful participation to occur before an expert, or polished level of absolute competence is realized.

Perpetual state of tinkering (learning etc…)

In learning environments where content is constantly being altered, one finds a design for the representation of knowledge as “open source”. That is to say, as a shareable resource that is unfinished, and literally available for revision anytime and anywhere that participants can access the site. Brian Lamb’s discussion of wikis highlights the design features of wikis that encourage and support a relationship to knowledge as “persistently beta”.

Microcontent authoring and improvement by community members

Think about the organization of content in a knowledge management system for course design, like Vista. Now think about how content comes into existence in a wiki, like Wikipedia, or indeed, the wiki we are using in this course. Vista is designed to limit the flow of content by means of a silo architecture, where you can move around from place to place, but rather like a traditional museum, you can’t touch anything, or put something of your own on display. Apart from the Forum and the Assessment tools, interactivity in Vista is reduced to button clicking. Whereas in a wiki, with its endlessly editable pages, openness is part of the design for learning, and indeed, for participation itself.

Social networking that is linked with content authoring

Social software applications tend to merge and blur binary distinctions between public and private, owned and shared, open and closed. With participation linked to the creation of content, content becomes linked to aggregates of participants. On a blog, for example, the content includes textual and or graphical material that is topical, as well as links to other sources/sites, and links to other blogs. The linking feature mediates the construction of communities of practice. Sites with mapping capabilities, likeCommunity Walk support collaborative projects by combining Google Map data with a flexible editing tool that allows users to add rich multimedia content directly to specific map locations, including text, images, URL’s etc…

arab and Duffy introduce us to the historical shift in discourses about the design of learning environments from a focus on representational, objective theories of individual learning “by acquisition,” to “situative,” socio-cultural theories that emphasize the relationship between participation in a “community of practice” (CoP), and the provision of opportunities to learn by appropriation.

The impact of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) Situated Learning on the ways that educational researchers and community-based practitioners construe the complex relationship between learning and setting has been extraordinary. As Barab and Duffy point out, there is a potentially confusing, apparent similarity between (a) educational theorists who talk about situated learning, and who design learning environments that are intended to help students “do school” more successfully, and (b) educational theorists whose interest is in characterizing how it is that learning occurs as a byproduct of interaction in communities of practice where participation is predicated on opportunities to learn.

A brief elucidation of the main characteristics of the CoP perspective will highlight what is unique about this perspective on learning. Lave and Wenger did not study, or even prioritize, the analysis of school learning, in the development of their theoretical account of CoPs. Rather, Lave (an anthropologist) and Wenger (a teacher) studied relatively bounded communities where people including naval quartermasters, AA members, midwives learned as part and parcel of joint action undertaken within social structures of participation.

For socio-cultural constructivists like Lave and Wenger, then, learning is not most significantly understood in terms of representational states in individual “minds”, but rather, as dialectical social and cultural practices that reflect the sedimented institutional history of particular settings, and involves the “historical production, transformation, and change of persons.” Understood as such, learning is an explicitly collaborative activity that is fundamentally orchestrated for the purpose of engineering social reproduction, as well as innovation.

A CoP orientation to learning is typically attuned to issues of power that shape social interactions in pedagogical settings, and to particular patterns of inclusion and exclusion. As Vygotsky (1997) pointed out,

“Pedagogics is never and was never politically indifferent, since, willingly and unwillingly, through its own work on the psyche, it has always adapted particular social patterns, political lines, in accordance with the dominant social class that has guided its interests.”

Closely related to the attention to issues of power and social inequities in CoPs, the focus on identity as a significant element in learning represents an important advance in constructivist theories. Thinking about the role of identity as scripted and produced in the course of learning, and as intimately bound up with opportunities for participation, requires us to think about the public character of learning, and the ways in which learning selves are public selves that are tied to particular conditions within which recognition is negotiated. This observation alone clearly tags a CoP analysis of learning environments as one within which any unreservedly optimistic notions about relations between environments, and opportunities for participation and citizenship, would of necessity be tempered by critical perspectives.

For cognitive constructivists, like Bereiter and Scardamalia, “the mind” is most usefully described in terms of knowledge states. Whereas for socio-cultural constructivists, “the mind” is explicated in terms of mediated action, practices, artifacts, social and contextual relations between participants in an activity system.

The most significant historical originary figure in socio-cultural psychology is Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), whose contribution to developmental psychology rivals in importance that of Piaget. Vygotsky created a Marxist psychology that emphasizes the social and cultural genesis of all learning, as well as the explicitly meliorative ideological project that education represents. Three key ideas undergird Vygotsky’s developmental psychology: mediation, internalization, and the zone of proximal development.

For Vygotsky, learning is mediated by cultural tools, including concrete artifacts, as well as symbol systems, like language. Learning, in this view, is social, before it is individualized, and inter-mental, before it reappears as intra-mental activity. As Vygotsky put it,

We can formulate the genetic law of cultural development in the following way… Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears on the social plane and then on the psychological plane. First it appears between people as an inter-psychological category and then within the individual child as an intra-psychological category… but it goes without saying that internalisation transforms the process itself and changes its structure and functions. Social relations or relations among people genetically underlie all higher functions and their relationships. (Vygotsky, 1978)

The “zone of proximal development” is the single most widely-circulating construct from Vygotsky’s psychology in North American English-speaking educational settings. As Vygotsky put it, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is:

“The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers “(Vygotsky, 1978).

The main contribution that the ZPD construct makes to a psychology of learning is to highlight that our performance of any particular skill varies in its actual competence level as a function of the interactive setting, and is highly variable. On this view, then, capacity to benefit from interaction with others, and/or with rich artifacts, doesn’t just add to one’s competencies, but produces shifts in competence. And so what is critical, from an educational perspective, then, is not what the child can do alone, or without access to their computer, but what particular combination of social actors and artifacts produces, collectively, the most significant advance in culturally valued knowledge. One might conclude from this, with Courtney Cazden (1981), that performance precedes competence, and in fact, that one may never “see” competence directly, and that we only ever see performance in educational settings. Think about the significance of this theory for understanding the importance of interaction to learning, of educational technologies to learning, and of setting to assessment.

Bereiter and Scardamalia’s emphasis on knowledge-building, and their insistence on its pedagogical priority, and its importance in the design of computer-supported intentional learning environments represents the hallmark of their unique and significant contribution to educational research. The authors make a clear and compelling distinction between learning and knowledge-building, that is worth thinking about at some length.

Whereas a great deal of school-based activity is oriented towards enhancing “learning,” this accomplishment, while significant, does not promote the production of clear and articulable advances in knowledge, nor does it enact a communal orientation towards the latter as a normative goal. And so it is quite possible to learn to read, but not to engage in reading activities as a means of knowledge transformation. It’s quite possible to learn all the elements in the Periodic Table, and have no interest in why the Table was created in the first instance, or what is its significance in scientific reasoning and research as, itself, a conceptual artifact.

Scardamalia and Bereiter, like Papert, are concerned about the flurry of activities in school that purport to make innovative uses of new media. An analysis of the focus of students’ work in these projects reveals (a) a “recreation of the familiar” (think, students making digital videos that simply reproduce knowledge already assembled elsewhere) and (b) superficial engagements with knowledge (knowledge-telling versus knowledge-transforming).

CSILE (computer supported intentional learning environment) was the authors’ first computer-based learning environment, CSILE, was extensively field-tested and the focus of a great deal of research in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Bereiter and Scardamalia released a commercially available product, Knowledge Forum.

CSILE is a networked computer-based environment that reorients learner activity towards achieving “cognitive objectives” and scaffolds collaborative work so as to support the “restructuring of schools as knowledge-building communities.” Carefully read the description of the cognitive and related social structures of schools that the authors provide (p. 268) and think about how it is that designs for educational activity orient participants towards particular kinds of cognitive objectives.

Scardamalia and Bereiter argue that new knowledge media support initiatives to restructure schools as knowledge-building communities. CSILE was designed in order to leverage particular affordances of networked media. At the heart of CSILE is its communal database. Participants contribute conceptual artifacts to this database that can be linked with the ongoing work of other community members. Cognitive scaffolding is provided by means of the flagging of notes with categories that index the contents in reference to the kind of thinking, or the metacognitive activity, that it represents, such as “My theory…”, or “What I need to know…”.

Lax, Taylor, Wilson-Pauwels, and Scardamalia (2004) discuss the design of Knowledge Forum <http://www.knowledgeforum.com/> , which is Scardamalia and Bereiter’s successor knowledge-building environment to CSILE. Knowledge Forum is widely used in educational (and other) settings internationally. The article we have read for this module outlines significant links between the design of Knowledge Forum, a pedagogical intervention premised on an educational model of knowledge-building, and the use of this technology-supported learning environment by a medical legal visualization class. This article productively outlines concrete relationships between pedagogical notions about how to support knowledge-building, and specific design characteristics that are built-in to Knowledge Forum. It is interesting and stimulating to think about what it is that makes Knowledge Forum explicitly educational in its design, in comparison with other networked technologies that are commonly used to support learning, such as the Web. One of these critical design features is the explicit separation of a representation of knowledge and an epistemic relationship to that knowledge that focuses on the extent to which it consists in a contribution to new knowledge – to innovation in that knowledge community. It is, indeed, rare, for the design of learning environments in schools to include affordances that highlight and scaffold what Scardamalia and her colleagues refer to as “epistemic agency”.

Scardamalia and Bereiter ask educators to look to existing communities of inquiry (e.g., scientific communities) in order to discern what are the relevant structures and practices that are characteristic of organizations that produce and sustain knowledge advances. There are commonalities between the approach to designing productive educational activity, and related uses of technology, suggested by Scardamalia and Bereiter, and “inquiry learning” or “project-based learning.” However the authors argue that the focus on “knowledge-building” is distinctive. The discussion of the relationship between knowledge-building and the important role of publication in scholarly journals that represents a cornerstone of scientific communities helps us to see what might be distinctive about their argument.

Papert’s programming language, LOGO, was developed as a means of providing children with “objects to think with.” Whereas Piaget’s constructivism tended to downplay the formative importance of cultural building blocks on learning, Papert’s “constructionism” places a high value on the pedagogical role of media. This is the substance of Papert’s major contribution to our thinking about how to support children’s learning.

Papert’s use of “constructionism” signals a significant shift from constructivism to include an emphasis on the social and interactive context, or the situatedness, of building valued artifacts within a bounded setting, or a “microworld”. As Papert wrote,

Constructionism—the N word as opposed to the V word—shares constructivism’s
connotation of learning as “building knowledge structures” irrespective of the
circumstances of the learning. It then adds the idea that this happens especially
felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a
public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.
(Papert 1991, p. 1)

Papert emphasizes the multiple ways in which the representation of knowledge in a computer program like LOGO, and its explicit manipulability, render concrete, and therefore accessible, the formal and abstract characteristics of mathematical knowledge, specifically, as well as metacognitive knowledge, more generally.

In the excerpt from Mindstorms that we have read, it is clear that Papert is making an impassioned and cogent argument for an approach to designing educational technologies that is qualitatively distinct from the conventional applications of that historical period – computer-based programmed instruction with a clear and linear lock-step curriculum. In Papert’s microworlds, learners are making things using tools that make abstractions concrete and manipulable. He emphasizes several aspects of the design of microworlds, including:

• Activity that focuses on concrete instantiations of abstract concepts
• Intelligent manipulation of objects
• Talking about thinking in the process of solving problems
• Reflections on thinking in the process of solving problems
• Failure as a normal and intelligent part of problem-solving, that leads to refinement of ideas
• Opportunities to represent ideas in a public forum where they can be explicitly testedPapert’s discussion about how educational institutions take up particular technologies is both insightful, and prophetic.

Papert’s discussion of how computers are typically used in supporting novice writers aptly identifies the problem at-hand, which is that educational uses of media tend to reproduce non-educational relations to tasks that are rich in potential for learning and intellectual growth. And so, for example, immature writers may use computers for writing, but “the computer is seen as a teaching instrument” where teaching writing is reduced to producing superficially correct text.