1 Introduction
2 Related literature
2.1 Social knowledge construction and social presence in online discussion settings
Phase | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
I. Sharing and comparing information | Statements of observation, agreement, opinion, examples, clarification, definition, description; identification of a question. | “I think to fully answer your question, we need to clarify what is meant by ‘know’ and ‘understand’.” |
II. Discovering dissonance or inconsistency | Identifying and stating aeras of disagreement; clarification of the source and extent of disagreement; restating one’s position or providing advancing arguments or considerations to support one’s opinions. | “Addressing the viewpoint you made about looking at how groups coordinate information with one another and the need to consider how collaboration can occur to solve problems, I don’t think this is as clear cut or simple in the real world.” |
III. Negotiation of ideas /co-construction of knowledge | Negotiation or clarification of the meaning of statements or terms; identification of aeras of agreement or overlap among conflicting concepts; proposal and negotiation of statements embodying compromise or co-construction; proposal of integrating or accommodating metaphors. | “With more information, I suppose we would see more connections. With more connections, there is a greater potential for us to uncover them and learn something. I hope that makes sense.” |
IV. Testing / modification of proposed synthesis | Testing the proposed synthesis against “received facts”, cognitive schema, personal experience, collected data, and contradictory testimony. | “My self-regulation skills are stronger than an undergraduate student and I have a learning-focused mindset. Thus, I think theories need to take motivation into consideration.” |
V—agreement statements / applications of newly-constructed knowledge | Summarization of agreement(s); application of new knowledge; metacognitive statements of changes in knowledge or ways of thinking. | “I think we all agree with this idea: the notion that knowledge is synthesized by finding novel connections between two dissimilar ideas rather than ‘discovering’ new knowledge like the knowledge workers did in the twentieth century.” |
Category | Indicator | Description | Example |
---|---|---|---|
Affective | Expression of emotions | Conventional or unconventional expressions of emotion, includes repetitious punctuation, emoticons | “Wow, you do a much better job of presenting a succinct and complete response than I could!” |
Use of Humor | Use humorous or witty language to express feelings or ideas | “I’ll answer that question with an archaic, tangential reference! What can I say? I am from the liberal arts...” | |
Self-disclosure | Present details of life outside class, or expresses vulnerability | “Maybe I’m perseverating too much on this distinction.” | |
Interactive | Continuing a thread | Give a comment or respond to other’s post | “RE: ‘someone’s thread title” |
Referring to other’s post | Make references to information of other’ post | “The ‘central tenet’ you cited really resonated with me.” | |
Asking questions | A question or several questions proposed in one’s post | “Do they all really know how to process and assess their learning?” | |
Complimenting, appreciating, expressing agreement | Complimenting someone on the content of one’s post Demonstrate agreement with someone on the content of one’s post | “You really brought things full circle for me. Thanks for the succinct and thoughtful post!” | |
Cohesive | Vocatives | Address or refer to someone by name | “I think John made a great point.” |
Addresses or refers to the group using inclusive pronouns | Address the group as we, us, our, group, team, etc. | “I think we all agree with this idea.” | |
Phatic, salutation | Communication that serves a purely social function; greetings, closures | “Hi Alex and Chris.” “That’s it for now.” |
2.2 Technology utilization for online discussions
3 Methods
3.1 Participants and research context
3.2 Data collection and analysis
Online Discussion Board (ODB) | VoiceThread (VT) | |
---|---|---|
Discussion Topic | Theoretical/historical literature relevant to online or distance learning | Technologies of online learning |
Guided Question | Please post a question that you have about the readings that are required for this section, the question can be about the main article: Toward a Theory of Online Learning -(Anderson, 2004). You need to post at least two questions about the theoretical foundations readings and respond to at least two of your classmates’ questions or comments. | For this discussion we will investigate a question: Do you believe that technology has a demonstrable, advantageous impact on learning? To answer this question meaningfully you need to provide three definitions: What do we mean by technology? What do we mean by learning? And what is the impact? |
Discussants & Comments (Excerpts) | Student 1 (Starter): My Question - Anderson (2004) provides a chart on page 44 that lists various “educational media” on scales of “interaction” and “independence of time and distance.” On this scale it is noted that “face-to-face” provides the most “interaction.” Do you all agree with this perspective? I am interested to hear from others, and while I know this is a more recently written piece, I wonder if this chart might appear differently now than it did in 2004. I look forward to hearing from you all! Student 2 (Follow-up): I do believe there is nothing that compares to being face to face with your students, reading body language and facial expressions and other visual cues. Technology is really starting to bridge that gap especially with the latest version of ** which is a synchronous virtual classroom where you can talk to and see students via their webcams. It being synchronous you can get real time interactions that really help create community. The main problem with this and many conferencing tools is that there is a learning curve for both instructor and student in both the technology and how to interact in an online space. Student 3 (Follow-up): Similar to KV’s stance, I absolutely agree that face-to-face interactions are rich with interpersonal communication. However, I do think there is a difference between this and interaction with the content. As an ELL Specialist at a college, I have lots of conversations with teachers who feel troubled when international students seldom participate in the classroom. I think this convenient stance is fraught, though. | Student 1 (Starter): Hi, everyone. I am AB. Whenever someone has asked me to define technology, my 7th grade technology teacher’s definition always pops in my head. Probably because of the mon flashcards we had to use in middle school. Anyway, Mr. Lavin defined technology as the application of accumulated knowledge to use tools for the purpose of meeting human needs and solving problems. The definition is always stuck with me and I think it’s applicable to the way that technology is used especially in learning. If you think of something as simple as a piece of chalk and a chalkboard. Those are tools that are used to meet human needs and solve problems. Kind of question and the argument I want to pitch here is; As I was rattling off my seventh grade definition of technology, my husband heard me and he argued that the definition is so much more beyond that now because we have so many tools that don’t necessarily meet human need or solve a problem. They’re a little bit extraneous. So I guess if you were to tweak the definition that I gave before, you know, would you agree with that? Do you think that we have come so far whereas we’re not really at the root of tools to meet human needs and solve problems anymore? Student 2 (Follow-up): Hey, AB. Good questions. You know I love the definition, you know, the accumulated knowledge that use of tools. I find I am curious as my question would be: Do you find that people a lot of times don’t need to have such accumulated knowledge of a tool or something to be using in gaining information. Might not but a good way to answer, but my example is a lot of times in my freelance jobs, I need to pick up a new software. Learn how to do some different type of project. I go and watch a few tutorials. I learn how to do really quick. Just enough know what I need to do. I guess it’s hard the question I am looking for, but is that the proper use of technology? And can you learn with the technology by just picking up just a little bit that you need. Cause there’s probably a dozen applications now that I would not even remember how to use at this point. Because I learned just a little bit to get what I need to do and then I stopped. |
4 Results
4.1 Participation and interaction patterns
Total post number | Average words amount per post | Key concepts, ideas or statements per post | |
---|---|---|---|
ODB | 72 | 222.71 | 5.49 |
VT | 44 | 402.45 | 6.52 |
Participants also demonstrated their positive attitudes towards the utilization of VT for online collaborative discussions in general. As one of the participants stated in one of the posts:Sometimes it is easier to speak your mind rather than thinking about how to put it on the text. When you are writing or typing, you tend to be conscious about the formality of your discussion discourse, which can stifle your thoughts.
Furthermore, to explore how the participants communicate and interact with others, Hewitt’s (2001) four online post types were used to examine the discussion posts. Table 5 displays that while there were active interactions among the participants in both settings, only a few participants provide responses to multiple classmates in a single post, and they rarely produced a more sophisticated type of posts that tied together ideas and concepts from different sources. This finding is consistent with that of Hewitt (2001), who found that most students make little effort to synthesize or summarize ideas from different posts during their conferencing sessions.Using an asynchronous tool like VoiceThread is fantastic since it gives me the ability to listen to a comment posted by a classmate, think it over and then I create a response.
Standalone | Single | Multiple | Convergence | Total | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
ODB | 17 | 51 | 2 | 2 | 72 |
VT | 7 | 30 | 1 | 6 | 44 |
4.2 Social presence in two discussion settings
Affective | Interactive | Cohesive | Total | SPD | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
ODB | 107 | 250 | 193 | 550 | 34.30 |
VT | 161 | 239 | 373 | 773 | 43.65 |
4.3 Social knowledge construction in two discussion settings
Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 | Phase 5 | Total | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ODB | 92 (37.7%) | 54 (22.1%) | 71 (29.1%) | 19 (7.8%) | 8 (3.3%) | 244 |
VT | 73 (37.4%) | 33 (16.9%) | 51 (26.2%) | 18 (9.2%) | 20 (10.3%) | 195 |
Total | 165 (37.6%) | 87 (19.8%) | 122 (27.8%) | 37 (8.4%) | 28 (6.4%) | 439 |