Transcript Productive tensions

Meaning making in CSCL:
Conditions and preconditions for
cognitive processes by groups
Gerry Stahl
The Math Forum @ Drexel
The I-School @ Drexel
[email protected]
http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/vmtwiki/paper.ppt
Meaning Making
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A central theme in CSCL literature
A key process in collaborative learning
Rarely investigated directly
How do people make sense of what is
taking place in an environment like the
Virtual Math Teams sessions?
• How can researchers analyze meaning
making in (synchronous) CSCL contexts?
• What are the conditions & preconditions
necessary to support online meaning
making? (see paper for another story)
How is meaning made?
Co-construction &/or reference to:
• Lexical definitions
• Environmental resources
• Intentional continuities
• Topical responses
• Contextual relevancies
• Indexical frames
Face-to-face classroom
• familiar people and artifacts
• parallel collaboration
How is meaning made F2F?
Co-construction &/or reference to:
• Lexical definitions — speech
• Environmental resources — physical artifacts
• Intentional continuities — human bodies
• Topical responses — turn taking
• Contextual relevancies — visually & physically
shared local history
• Indexical frames — gesture, glance
How is collaboration
accomplished?
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Physical individuals each work
Maintain visual & auditory coordination
Gestures to show (lack of) progress
Gestures & turn taking to share
Cooperation & sharing ensures that the
group synthesizes what each individual did
• Cooperation & sharing ensures that each
individual has learned what the group did
disembodied text
background issues
1. Avr (8:21:46 PM): Okay, I think we should start with the
formula for the area of a triangle
2. Sup (8:22:17 PM): ok
3. Avr (8:22:28 PM): A = 1/2bh
4. Avr (8:22:31 PM): I believe
5. pin (8:22:35 PM): yes
6. pin (8:22:37 PM): i concue
7. pin (8:22:39 PM): concur*
8. Avr (8:22:42 PM): then find the area of each triangle
9. Avr (8:22:54 PM): oh, wait
10. Sup (8:23:03 PM): the base and heigth are 9 and 12
right?
11. Avr (8:23:11 PM): no
12. Sup (8:23:16 PM): o
13. Avr (8:23:16 PM): that's two separate triangles
14. Sup (8:23:19 PM): ooo
15. Sup (8:23:20 PM): ok
16. Avr (8:23:21 PM): right
17. Avr (8:23:27 PM): i think we have to figure out the height
by ourselves
18. Avr (8:23:29 PM): if possible
19. pin (8:24:05 PM): i know how
20. pin (8:24:09 PM): draw the altitude'
21. Avr (8:24:09 PM): how?
22. Avr (8:24:15 PM): right
23. Sup (8:24:19 PM): proportions?
24. Avr (8:24:19 PM): this is frustrating
25. Avr (8:24:22 PM): I don't have enough paper
26. pin (8:24:43 PM): i think i got it
27. pin (8:24:54 PM): its a 30/60/90 triangle
28. Avr (8:25:06 PM): I see
29. pin (8:25:12 PM): so whats the formula
VMT ConcertChat
How is meaning made online?
Co-construction &/or reference to:
• Lexical definitions — textual vocabulary using IM
conventions
• Environmental resources — digital &
computational artifacts
• Intentional continuities — time-stamped IM
handles
• Topical responses — recursive proposal
bid/responses
• Contextual relevancies — visually persistent text
& graphics
• Indexical frames — textual sequentiality
A CSCL Data Excerpt
• The students in this excerpt reflect on their
meaning making in a previous session
• They have trouble in their meaning making
in this session and must repair it & make it
explicit
• This excerpt is hard for researchers to
make sense of, so we must make our
analytic meaning making explicit
• We have a record of the interaction that is
adequate for analysis of online meaning
making of a small group
Re-play the session
• Open the log file at:
• http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/
vmtwiki/teamb.xls
• Download the data file at:
• http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/
vmtwiki/teamb.jno
• Fire up the VMT Re-Player at:
• http://vmttest.mathforum.org/vmtChat/
vmtplayerv1/vmtplayerv1.jsp
• Excerpt: from 18/05/2006, 07:29:46 –
07:33:11
Lexical definitions
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Dictionary word meanings
Local jargon
Co-constructed objects and names
Traditional understanding of meaning as
reference to ideal objects, attributes as
represented in individual minds
• Sentence in head mirrors fact in world
1424
“that”
Aznx
“is”
That is theirs
07.33.02
“theirs”
But what is that and who are they and so
what?
Environmental resources
• The group enacts the resources and
affordances of its environment
• The technological medium, the presented
problem text, the social setting
• VMT environment had chat, shared
whiteboard (textboxes, drawings), wiki,
awareness messages & graphical refs
• Now has lobby, multiple boards, more wiki,
social networking in lobby
1420 bwang8 “point formula out with the
tools so we don’t get confused”
07.32.37
Intentional continuities
• The online system associates each
posting with a handle (person’s ‘name’)
• A posting may be closely related to a
previous posting with the same handle
• The continuity of postings with a given
handle is associated with the intentionality
of a person
• A group of handles that has defined itself
as a group can also have continuity, e.g.,
across sessions
Topical responses
• Conversation is often driven by “adjacency
pairs” like question/answer,
greeting/greeting, proposal/acceptance
• Online discourse is often driven by topical
response pairs, or “uptakes” of a topic
proposed by one person by another
• A pair can be (recursively) interrupted by
another pair: clarifying, questioning,
repairing
Contextual relevancies
• Often implicit reference to people, things,
events in the local context
• Often referred to by citation, repetition of
words
• The con-text (given with the text) is coconstructed by bringing items into the
discourse context
Indexical frames
• The discourse creates and maintains a
referential system in which indexicals &
deictic terms (you, now, this, his, it, then)
are resolved
• Relative to speaker (me, you) and tense
(is, was, had been, will be)
How is meaning made?
The meaning of the interaction is coconstructed through the building of a
multi-dimensional web of contributions
and references.
The meaning made by the group consists
in this subtle and complex implicit
network of inter-relationships.
An implication for research
The significance of an individual utterance
is dependent upon its sequential
relationship with many other utterances,
artifacts, topics, etc.
While it may be useful for certain narrow
inquiries to code & count isolated
individual utterances, in general, this
misses their very meaning in the
interaction.
An implication for technology
Technological platforms for CSCL should
provide flexible support for users to
weave subtle webs of meaning
Environments should provide ways for
users to maintain different forms of
persistency, referencing and awareness
to support the co-construction and
evolution of networks of meaning for
collaboration, knowledge building and
group cognition
An implication for theory
In cases involving the accomplishment of group
cognitive achievements, the determination of the
significance of an individual utterance should be
done at the group unit of analysis — as opposed,
e.g., to viewing it as the expression of a mental
representation at the individual unit of analysis
Group cognition depends upon individual
contributions, but the group phenomena are
essential for CSCL, consisting in the shared
meaning of the network of co-constructed
contributions and references inscribed in the
online venue
Acknowledgments & refs
The VMT team for the conditions of research;
NSF, Drexel, Math Forum for its preconditions.
• Lexical definitions — traditional philosophy
• Environmental resources — Stahl (JECR)
• Intentional continuities — Stahl (IJCIS)
• Topical responses — Stahl (RPTEL)
• Contextual relevancies — Suthers (06, 07)
• Indexical frames — Hanks (92); Zemel (07)
Links
• my website with papers on group cognition and
analyses of VMT interactions —
http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/
• http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/vmtwiki/paper.
ppt (these slides)
• read: Stahl (2006) Group Cognition, MIT Press.
• subscribe to: the International Journal of CSCL
through your ISLS membership