CSCL 99 Doctoral Consortium

December 11-12^th, 1999

McGill University, Faculty of Education

My research purpose is twofold: 1) to provide a richer understanding of cooperative visual mediated design; 2) to develop and validate a cognitive model of design activity. In considering the knowledge needed to design in real-world, team settings, I investigate visual communication, how designers think and talk with their diagrams, drawings, sketches, etc.

Design may be considered as a prototypically knowledge-rich, information-poor problem requiring complex and multiple representations and processes in order to produce an object of value. The question of modeling cooperative design knowledge becomes one of articulating how designers coordinate natural and visual languages in order to facilitate negotiation and design production. I adopt an activity theory framework in which knowledge is seen as being mediated by social practices and technologies. I also view cognition as situated and distributed.

I propose looking at the knowledge needed by designers by focusing on the discourse units which emerge from their integrated verbal and visual activity. Using a qualitative, ethnomethodological approach as practiced in cognitive anthropology, I intend to provide a cognitive analysis of visual design based on adapting a design model (Goel, 1995) to the multimodal discourse - image and verbal - of designers.

Georgia Institute of Technology

Oral history projects provide a way for children to learn history by interacting with real people who have lived through the events. These projects, for instance Foxfire (http://www.foxfire.org/), have shown educational benefits while allowing kids to explore history in a personally meaningful way.

Although face-to-face oral history has significant learning potential, there is a significant cost as well. Teachers are already overwhelmed with work and organizing oral history projects requires additional effort. From organizing classroom visits by historians and elders, to taking students on field trips, to training students to do interviews and use that interview data in projects, oral history projects are a difficult undertaking for all involved. In fact, our early work (see paper in CSCL 99) shows that even exceptionally talented teachers in history-rich neighborhoods have difficulty doing such projects.

I am building an online community of history -- a constructionist software system that aims to bring oral history projects to more classrooms. I believe that computing technology may help in this process in two primary ways. First, computing technology can bring kids the stories of elders around the country and the world. Second, computing technology can reduce teacher effort. For instance, teachers will not have to organize repeated visits from outsiders. In this doctoral consortium, I am looking forward to getting feedback on the design of my software and on my evaluation methodology.

The University of Michigan

The purpose of this study is to understand the nature of students' on and off-line scientific discourse, the patterns of interaction and participation in a community of discourse, and students' development of scientific knowledge in the community. In particular, I am interested in the characteristics of scientific understandings students might develop in the learning environment where electronic discourse with a large number of participants in distant locations are introduced to classroom discourse. In this study, the following two questions will be examined: 1) Is there synergy between classroom discourse and electronic discourse while a science classroom is participating in an Internet-enhanced program? 2) What scientific literacy (e.g. conceptual understanding, inquiry process, and how students represent their own ideas to others) will emerge from the synergy?

The primary data set for this study is composed of electronic messages on the Message Board and video records of whole classroom and small group discussions during the eight week period of the Kids as Global Scientists '99 program. In addition, before and after the program interviews with the teacher and two target groups of students (n=8), and pre- and post-questionnaires concerning students' experiences and scientific conceptual understandings (n=25) were collected as secondary data source.

University of Missouri-Columbia

This project is a case study of two cohorts of students in a teacher development program--secondary science education majors and secondary language arts education majors--who are using computer mediated communication tools as students and as developing professionals,. The  goal of this research is to begin to identify the factors--technological, pedagogical, and sociological--that affect preservice teachers' appropriation of computer supported technologies and their ability to use these tools in collaborative learning communities online.  I am collecting data through real-time and virtual observation of student communications, interviews, and surveys in an attempt to understand the relationship of communication patterns, community, and voice in the classroom and online. I will examine factors such as differences in faculty as models of technology-using teachers; differences in disciplinary applications and uses of technology; differences in teaching philosophies as manifested in class activities, assignments, forms of assessment; and differences in preservice teachers such as previous experience with technology use and attitudes about teaching and learning with technology.  This study should yield findings that will be important for teacher educators as we seek to integrate technology into the education curriculum to prepare teachers to use these tools as members of professional communities of practice.

University of Colorado, Boulder

Open Systems, in which users can effect significant changes to all aspects of a (socio-technical) system, have the potential of radically changing the way that we work and collaborate. The complex problems faced by people, and the collaborative knowledge construction needed to solve these problems, are ideal candidates for open environments. However, to develop effective Open Systems, we must understand the potential both of people and technology. In my work, I have been studying the processes through which Open Systems function and change over time. Of particular interest is how Open Systems can evolve in a distributed (although not necessarily decentralized) manner and how collaborative technologies can be utilized. I have been exploring these ideas through the development of theories as well as open collaborative technologies. In my work developing the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory, I have tried to try to create a dynamic environment facilitating open evolution. This environment supports computer-enhanced face-to-face communication (through multi-modal physical/virtual interaction) and distributed collaborative work (through evolving information spaces) in the context of authentic problems. Therefore, my work involves creating and studying Open Systems that change at the hands of their users.

Cornell University

I conducted my dissertation research at a private K-12 school, using case study and ethnographic methods (interviews, observations and document review) to explore the school community's experience with educational technologies. For my data analysis I drew upon a wide variety of disciplines--science and technology studies, organizational communication, computer supported collaborative learning, and computer supported cooperative work. This school was a national leader in educational technology in the early 90's, but some community members were concerned that it was losing its technological "edge." I found many exciting technological activities taking place, but because they didn't conform to the model established at the school in the early days of technological development, few community members appreciated what teachers and students were doing. The school's initial experimentation with technology was driven by a strong leader and a few teachers who developed their own software. This established a perception in the school that educational technology was: 1. leader-driven; 2. developed in-house; 3. time and resource intensive; 4. the domain of highly skilled teachers. Interestingly, this model did not prevent other teachers from experimenting with smaller technological projects. It only prevented the community from recognizing the value of these activities.

Center for Technology Innovations in Education, University of Missouri, Columbia

This dissertation appropriates Vygoskian ideas (zone of proximal development, guided participation, language as cultural tools) to interpret how youth and mentors in a CSCL-mediated project-based learning environment built shared understanding of their goal, tasks, procedures and outcomes when solving ill-defined problems. The goal of this study is to identify the different types of knowledge present in this environment and to examine how the knowledge was constructed through the joint activities and discourse of a community of learners. By knowledge construction is meant the building of shared understandings among a group of learners (Edwards & Mercer, 1987). The "discourse" in this study includes concepts and terminology specific to this CSCL environment–the Internet-based Shared Environment for Expeditions (iExpeditions)--, as well as the computer-mediated dialogues, conversations and representations. The major research question is how team members within the same team or across teams exchange ideas and develop shared understandings of the iExpeditions concepts and terminology, the process and procedure of a problem-solving activity (an expedition), and context-specific knowledge in the Internet-based Shared Environment for Expeditions (iExpeditions). The researcher will use an interpretative case study to investigate the interactive process through which participants in each team constructed shared understandings on the major types of knowledge (declarative, procedural and contextual) in the six phases of the problem-solving activities. The communication artifacts among youth and mentors will be analyzed through the psycholinguistic discourse analysis method (Edwards & Mercer, 1987). Understanding of the types of knowledge being built and the process of building it will help the project stakeholders create the best possible iExpeditions environment.