I recently gave a keynote presentation at ICETC 2011 in Changchun, where I discussed some of the experiences from facilitating the course “Introduction to CSCL” on P2PU, and pointed towards some ideas for technologies and ways of organizing courses that could enable deeper learning in open courses.

I started by noting how we live in a world with an abundance of resources, and then mentioning some of the ways in which we can be informal learners. We can use “site-specific information-centric communities” such as StackOverflow to get quick answers to something, while we are working on a problem (I absolutely agree with David Wiley that this qualifies as learning).

Much of my learning happens in what I call “long-term distributed topic-based communities”. This would be something like the “edublogosphere”, with people who discuss issues and share information over a long time, held together through RSS feeds, crosslinking, Twitter-hashtags, etc. However, as Mike Caulfield pointed out, there is something very powerful about a cohort moving through a set learning path or collection of materials together. Open courses, whether they be small learning groups on P2PU, or big MOOCs, is about offering more people the opportunity to participate in such learning experiences.

I then discussed some of the issues that came up during our course, such as the “dream of amplification”, the various dimensions of open courses, the dimensions of course organizer "authority" and our interesting experience with "threaded chat".

Finally, I discussed ways in which the course data could be analyzed and introduced two metaphors for organizing online courses: stimulus/response and divergence/convergence, and looked at how the latter model could be implemented in an open course based on a multitude of Web 2.0 platforms.

This talk, together with the links above, represent a lot of my current thinking and some of the research I would like to pursue. I would love to receive feedback, pushback and ideas. (PS: The slides are synchronized with a recording of my presentation – you won’t get much out of them if you just view the slides by themselves).

Stian

What is a follower?

P2PU courses have always been entirely transparent, even without logging in, a visitor would be able to see not only the course outline and the links to all the freely accessible course resources (often linked from other websites), but also all the interactions and discussions between the course members.

On the new P2PU platform, we decided to formally enable people to “follow” courses. This would function similar to Twitter, where you can follow anyone without needing their permission (different from Facebook, where friending is reciprocal), and receive their updates.

Thus, when we launched our course called “Introduction to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning” on P2PU this spring, we explicitly offered two different modes of participation. You could apply to be a core member, and be expected to do the readings every week, post on your own blog and participate in the weekly meetings. I have blogged about the participation statistics of the core members earlier.

How did following work in our course?

However, many people might be interested in the course topic, yet not have enough time (or inclination) to commit to being an active member. These people could “follow” the course. People added themselves as followers throughout the course, and currently we have about 50 people signed up. We were very curious about their experience of the course. Our course launched at the same time as the new platform, so it is natural to assume that some of the followers were just trying out new functionality. Others might have used it as an internal bookmark, reminding themselves to go back in the future. Did anyone actually actively follow along and get something meaningful out of the course?

(Part of the problem with evaluating this, is that the website was under rapid development, and a lot of new functionality was added as the course was running. Initially, followers did not receive any e-mail updates. About mid-ways, they began receiving updates that course organizers marked as “important” (typically the bi-weekly updates). In the future, followers will probably have the same choices of e-mail notifications as course participants, which might significantly change how they interact with courses they follow).

Survey of followers

We had hoped to see our course “amplified” through our followers, with retweets and blogs about topics they found interesting. There was, however, very little evidence of this. There was some retweeting and mentioning in blogs, but this was mainly along existing individual social networks. Thus, hearing nothing from the followers, it was hard to guess whether they were getting anything out of the course. So we decided to design a simple survey (see the questions we asked).

We got about 10 answers, which was more than I had hoped for, given that the followers were by definition not very active (some of them might even have left the P2PU platform altogether). Some said they had signed up, but never had time to look, some were planning to go back and review the material later, and some said they had popped in once in a while, and gotten a bit out of it. But one person stood out, professing a lot of enthusiasm, and answering “10″, where we asked students to rate how much they’d learnt from 1-10. I was very intrigued and e-mailed him, to see if I could ask him some more questions. He gracefully agreed to let me do a short e-mail interview, and post it here.

This is interesting not only to get a novel perspective on “following”, which is a rather new feature on the P2PU website, but also because the subject of “lurking” has caused quite a bit of debate in the MOOCosphere (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 for a random selection).

One of the things that especially struck me by his answers was how the concept of “eight weeks” for the course has little meaning to a follower. I do believe that having a cohort (like Mike Caulfield talks about) moving through a set learning trajectory together can be very powerful, but that doesn’t mean that the course materials (the initial ones, and the generated discussion) is worthless once the course is “over”… And one of the things I am thinking about right now, is to how to better present all the great resources that were generated during the course to new visitors – currently you need to dig around a bit to find the gems.

Who are you? Where do you live, what do you do?

My name is Daniel Marcell Góngora Flores, I live in La Paz, Bolivia, I am an Electronics Engineering student at Universidad Mayor de San Andrés.

Currently, I am working on my undergraduate thesis project, a Virtual Control Systems Laboratory based on the Furuta pendulum for experimentation under the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning approach.

How did you first hear about P2PU, how long have you been involved, what has your experience been, have you taken any other courses, etc.

Since I found MIT’s OpenCourseWare, I started looking for open educational resources in order to be a competitive student today and a competitive professional tomorrow.

I remember reading a blog post about a “School of Webcraft” that somehow was related to Mozilla. That was enough for me to look for more information, and that is how I arrived at the P2PU web site.

I first took a course called “Algoritmos y estructuras de datos”(Algorithms and Data Structures). I quited after 4 or 5 weeks. Then, I took a course called “Getting started with Scilab”, I did not quit this time just because I couldn’t find a way to do it. Why I quit? Despite the course organizers effort, I was not really comfortable with the teacher-student method and I didn’t have much time to do the tasks due to work in the first course (there was not a “follower” type of student at that time), in the second one I felt that I was reading another Scilab tutorial, nothing new, no activities to encourage discussion nor active participation.

I was not happy with the courses, but how to organize a course so that the participants become real participants and not only receivers?

How did you hear about the CSCL course

With the arrival of the new P2PU web site, I started browsing the courses almost every week. One day I found a course called “Introduction to the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning”. At that time, I didn’t knew anything about CSCL. Nevertheless, it being such an active course, I decided to follow it.

What made you interested?

Once I started reading the course material, I realized that CSCL was about learning through social interaction. Reading about that simple idea was such an eye opening experience to me, because I was used to learning by myself. Thanks to the Open Educational Resources, I was able to fill the spaces and connect the dots in my head without needing a teacher neither a partner. Now, it seems there is another way, a very interesting one.

Why did you decide to follow the course instead of participating

So, participating is the way to go. Being an active participant is how I will learn more. However, there was a problem: my English level. I am still building my English skills, the language barrier was stopping me from participating in this course because I was not able to participate in the chat rooms nor to write weekly blog posts in English, Spanish being my mother tongue. That’s why I became a peripheral learner.

What did you expect when you chose to follow the course – what did you think it meant?

I did not expect to find the topic of my undergraduate thesis project by just following the course, but I did (at least in some sense). Given that this was the first time I “heard” this term, my very first reaction was to look for CSCL in Wikipedia to try to understand what was this about.

How was your experience of following the course? During the eight weeks, what was your involvement – what part of the material or conversation did you look at, how much time did you spend, what was useful or interesting to you?

Being a follower, a peripheral learner, to talk about “the eight weeks” doesn’t make much sense because I am/was free to read the material (papers, wiki entries, blog posts, chat logs, etc.) at my own pace, whenever I wanted to. In fact, I’m still reading the material from week 4.

This is important to me because I am a engineering student, and even if I had read some papers related to education, I don’t have the background necessary in some cases to understand the material.

I could not say exactly how many hours I spend reading the course materials. However, the amount of time I spend reading the material is increasing significantly every week.

That being said, I always find it interesting reading wiki entries because of the references. Also, I found the blog posts and the chat logs very valuable because reading those made me feel part of the group, a group of people hungry for knowledge. I must admit that I’m a little bit jealous, because for me it’s hard to find people willing to learn and share their opinions in my “environment”. I think that this is a direct consequence of the commercialization of education here in Bolivia. A large number of friends of mine, students and professionals, think that what really matters is to have a really big CV filled with “n’importe quoi” instead of looking for opportunities to grow up. Filling the wallet is their final goal.

To me, the only way to improve education in Bolivia is applying collaborative learning and using open educational resources. Specially when the University teachers in particular and the educational institutions in general are not committed with this important role.

This was my first year attending the bi-annual CSCL conference, which this year happened to be at the Hong Kong University campus. I was very excited, since I had been reading papers by many of the people who would be attending, and it would also be the first time I’d be in Hong Kong (and later China) with my supervisor, and people from my university.

Although the actual core conference only lasts for a few days, I began my participation with two days of pre-conferences, attended post-conference events in both Guangzhou and Beijing, and even the doctoral summer school in Beijing that was affiliated with the conference. Thus, my earliest notes are from the pre-conference on machine learning and data analysis on July 4th, and my latest ones from Gerry Stahl'stalk to the international summer school on July 18th.

However, there were of course sessions I did not capture notes for. Taking detailed notes is exhaustive, and it’s difficult to do it the entire day. This is added to mundane issues like finding power outlets, etc. Either way, I hope the notes might be helpful – they certainly are to me. Overview over all notes.

The first pre-conference which I mentioned above was organized by Carolyn Penstein Rosé and her post-doc Gregory Dyke, and discussed tools to analyze computer-mediated communications. We got training in using Tatiana, a tool to analyze synchronous events with time-coded data from multiple media (for example videos, transcripts, chat and a shared whiteboard). In the afternoon, we learnt to use SIDE, which is a GUI for a machine-learning framework. Although nobody can become an expert in machine-learning in one afternoon, it was a great overview of the state of the art of machine learning, giving you a sense of what kinds of problems machine learning might be appropriate for. (For people interested in ML, McLaren, Scheuer & Miksátko, 2010 is a great paper showing how ML can be applied to a specific educational challenge, and the thinking that went in to choosing the right algorithm).

The second pre-conference was about connecting levels of learning, organized by Dan Suthers, Chris Teplovs, Marten de Laat, Jun Oshima and Sam Zeini. I’ve read about these ideas before, in Suthers et al., 2010, and found them interesting, but quite complex. In this workshop, Gerry Stahl gave a great historical/philosophical overview over CSCL as a discipline, and Dan Suthers presented on their theoretical approach. Then, a few datasets had been shared between researchers who provided different analyses of them – very interesting (although not always easy to tie back to the original theoretical framework of the session).

Ed Chi from Google Research opened the conference with an interesting keynote on augmented social cognition, with several neat cases from his work with access to huge data sets. From the conference sessions, I managed to capture two very interesting sessions on technology-enhanced interactions & analysis (1, 2), and one session on MUPEMURE, a “Model of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning with Multiple Representations”.

There were some very interesting presentations about the future of Knowledge Forum in the Guangzhou post-conference, which I did not manage to capture (but check out these slides 1, 2). I did get some notes from two of Gerry Stahl’s presentations, one describing two case study analyses he did, and one on the history and future of CSCL.

I’m looking forward to the International Conference on Learning Sciences next year in Sydney (CSCL and ICLS alternate every other year), where I hop to present a paper on open learning environments. I’m also planning to dig into all the notes I took, and all the connections I made, read more papers, etc.

Stian

The course

During the past eight weeks, Monica Resendes and I facilitated a course called “Introduction to the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning” on P2PU. We are both interested in developing a research agenda around open courses, although this first course did not have an explicit research design or research questions. We approached it as a “baseline”, to get an idea of how it is to facilitate courses on P2PU, and also to try out some ideas regarding design and organization.

I can certainly say that I learnt a huge amount from the course, both from the actual content of course (all the course participants were scarily brilliant, lot’s of great insights in the blog posts and discussions!), and from the experience of facilitating the course in itself. Having been so close to the runnings of P2PU from the very beginning, and having worked closely with many course organizers, I was actually surprised at how much I learnt – but I did. Being a course organizer yourself is a whole different experience.

Part of it is the change of focus. Earlier, I thought of technical changes in terms of all the different courses, how much support it would need, how much in demand a feature was etc. But when you are a course organizer, you have laser-focus on your own course, and what it needs. And you’ve spent a lot of time developing the ideas, imagining a vision of how the course will go, etc. (Of course, it becomes interesting when this vision is not the same as the students’ vision of how the course should run, which I will blog about later).

Lessons learnt

Anyway, last week the course ended, and now we are thinking about what we have learnt. We posted five simple questions for all the active participants:

• What was the best thing about this course?
• Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?
• Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week?
• How should we improve the organization of the course in the future?
• How could the different tools and communication channels work better?

and we’ve got some great answers in this thread, and Martin also replied on his blog.

Participation

Monica and I are planning to do more analysis of the participation patterns etc, and we are currently preparing a survey to send out to “followers”, but I did a quick count of participation statistics for the people who signed up to “participate” in the course.

Of 13 participants (plus Monica and I, who also participated actively in all activities, but whom I have not included in these statistics), there were two whom we never heard from again after they were admitted to the course (one of whom has not done anything else on P2PU either, the single item in their activity feed is being admitted to the course). Apart from those two, a further five students “left us” during the first few weeks (one actually posted a message stating that she was not able to keep up due to other commitments, the others just “faded away”).

That left us with six students who were fairly active, and committed to the very end. Together with the course organizers, the eight of us have become a pretty tight-knit community, and really enjoyed the ride together. We’ve participated in different ways, one was never able to make the Saturday group chats, whereas most of the others did, some have used the forums on P2PU actively, others preferred their own blog, one never blogged, but made every single group meeting, etc. But they were all fairly active almost every week of the course, from the start to the end.

I know this is a very simplified analysis, but it also correlates with what I experienced (although going back to look at the data was useful – some of the people who signed up but never showed up, I had kind of forgotten about, but I had also forgotten about some of the people that were active during week one or two, but then faded out).

I am really grateful that we were able to finish strong (almost everyone made it to an amazing meeting in week 7 with guest speaker Sandy McAuley, and again to the last meeting this weekend, and every single person of those eight has posted a reflection on the five questions we asked them). I really didn’t want this course to slowly fade out. While we are all discussing interesting ways of carrying the course community forwards, including creating a sort of CSCL “book-club”, it’s valuable to have some kind of “closure” for our experience together these eight weeks.

However, I would of course have loved to see more of the about 50% of people who didn’t “complete” the course engage more actively. I myself was absent from the course for almost two weeks due to travel and an eye infection, and experienced how hard it was to “reinsert myself” into the community. At that time, I wrote to several students who had not been active, and encouraged them in a non-judgmental way to “get back on the train”. I received several positive responses to that message, but nobody actually did.

I’ve also written to all the participants who have yet to post reflections, and asked them to do so – even for people who were not active at all, I’d love to hear their thoughts. Or – if someone was reading a lot, but never posted, that’s also very valuable information.

The future?

Any lessons for the future? Well, although I did make it quite explicit what kind of participation I expected of “core participants”, there was no way of linking to this from the sign-up page, when the course was getting started, so I had no guarantee of students having read it.  (I really hope this will be fixed before I run another course). I’m also thinking that perhaps next time, I will make the sign-up question a bit “harder” – not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of engagement. For example, by asking students to read one article, and post some thoughts about it on their blog. That way, they have to do something a lot more active than just clicking “subscribe”, and two sentences about their interest, and I’ll already have their blog URLs.

On the other hand, there were 7 people who applied to the course and did not provide enough information. I asked them to do so, but they never responded. (It’s possible that they did not receive the notification). Perhaps if I had let some of them in, they would have gotten interested, and would have participated more than some of the people who did get in… Given that participation beyond week 1 was such a strong measure of completion, perhaps we should do like undergraduate classes, which let almost anyone sign up for the first two weeks, and then kick people out who are not active enough.

Of course, I could just open enrolment to anyone – and indeed, maybe the active group had settled on being exactly the same. I still think there is a value to having a small group of people who make an explicit commitment to learning together over a certain period of time, but I certainly don’t think it’s the only way to do things.

Stian

As part of my Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship, I am asked to reflect once a year on progress I have made, and think about challenges I may have encountered (and overcome hopefully.) It always seems difficult to find the time to write these reports, but turns out to be an incredibly useful exercise in taking a longer-term view. It helps me to notice trends and developments that are easy to miss in the day-to-day excitement.

This is not an overview of all the things that have happened at P2PU in the last year, but rather it’s a reflection on along three broad themes: (1) building a social learning platform and community, (2) laying the groundwork, and building the partnerships necessary for hacking certification, (3) and making P2PU run like a well-oiled machine, that is fast and nimble, but remains committed to openness and transparency.

It’s long. You were warned. Photos thrown in for entertainment.

Building a Social Learning Platform and Community

• We ran two rounds of courses, and continued to double the number of courses and size of our community each time (as we have done in every round so far). More than 3300 users signed up for 54 courses and the community has grown to almost 20,000 registered users by June 2011. A significant part of this growth has been driven by School of Webcraft, and together with partners we are developing a number of other schools (including schools for social innovation, maths education, and we are currently preparing the first courses of a planned school of education / teacher training).
• A major milestone was the complete re-design and migration to our new web site which we just launched on June 17th (old site: archive.p2pu.org). The development work was led by Zuzel Vera, our fantastic technology lead who came onboard full-time earlier this year. She rolls out updates to the site every 2 weeks, which means things are getting better all the time and we are super excited to see a small, but active open source community starting to contribute code. The idea has always been to get people who are using P2PU involved in the process of improving the platform – and we are now offering a P2PU course for developers to help them get started (one for for UX designers is coming soon.) If you want to geek out on the technical details (Python/Django mainly) check out our github page and development task tracker.
• As part of the redesign, we decided to make some adjustments to our model and added support for more flexible courses and study groups. Requiring all courses to be more or less the same length, and setting a coordinated start date, didn’t work for everyone. And in between the course cycles, there were no courses new users could sign-up for. That’s why the new site adds support for self-organized study groups that can run perpetually and encourage users to start courses and study groups at any point, and not confined to a small number of cycles each year.

Hacking Certification

One of my main interests has always been the idea of “hacking certification” and how we can recognize or certify achievements that take place in informal communities like P2PU.

• We worked hard to establish the concept of badges as part of an alternative accreditation system. P2PU co-hosted the “Badge Lab” (agenda, blog post from a participant) which ended up growing into one of the most influential streams of the event, and has since evolved into its own project, hosted by Mozilla, to create an open badges infrastructure. We are also building more support around the idea of badges, by organizing a badges working group for the MacArthur Foundation (second workshop coming up).
• Since some of these ideas are fairly new (and controversial) and I also spent a fair amount of time thinking out loud and spreading the word. Vijay Kumar invited me to speak about “hacking certification” in his “open education” course at the Harvard Extension School and I wrote a longer blog post about it afterwards (has links to recording). I presented similar ideas as part of a joint session on certification in open education with Sir John Daniel (ex Commonwealth of Learning) at the OpenCourseWare Global Conference at MIT (slides at slideshare), and discussed the implications of all this for the “Future of the University” at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. And I was recently invited to give a keynote on the topic at Open Ed 2011, which will take place later this year.
• Another focus has been to build partnerships with organizations and people that have a shared interest in providing certification for open learning. We continue to work with Mozilla on badges, and the School of Webcraft. The University of California Irvine has been a great supporter and partners since the early days, and we hope to issue professional development unites through UCI Extension very soon. And we are strengthening our relationship with MIT. Steve Carson from the OpenCourseWare project has been an advisor to P2PU, and Joi Ito whom I consider a mentor and who ran the Digital Journalism course at P2PU last year recently took over as director of the MIT Media Lab. Lots of opportunities there! Another great source of inspiration has come from Hal Plotkin, the senior policy advisor to the under-secretary of education, who has helped us think through a lot of these issues with a view on connecting them into the formal education system in the US.

The Machine that runs P2PU

• Made lots of progress, building an organization to support P2PU. I wrote this summary blog post that gives a lot more detail, but in a nutshell: We incorporated as a 501(c) non profit organization in the US, and obtained our tax exempt status. We appointed a really fantastic board of directors that consists of the founders, community members, and two long term strategic partners (Cathy Casserly, Creative Commons; and Mark Surman, Mozilla). For more detail on the board see this post. We are also revamping our advisory group and are specifically looking to add more business expertise and experience. And we started hiring a few great people to add to the team. P2PU is still entirely grant funded today, which is something we intend to change (see below) but we received a Hewlett grant which allows us to diversify our core funding (and we are waiting to hear back about two other large proposals.)
• While building an organization that can accept funds and provides a legal structure is important, the open P2PU community continues to be our foundation and greatest success. We ran another great community workshop in Barcelona, October 2010 to set the strategy for 2011. We are navigating how to be open and transparent to allow a wide variety of opinions and encourage participation, while at the same time being able to move fast like a start-up company (and fulfill the legal obligations of a non-profit organization). It’s a balance act, but it’s fun. For example, as we are increasing the number of paid staff, we are designing processes that involve the community – by sharing job descriptions for review and feedback, asking for nominations from the community, involving community members in the interviews, and discussing our compensation principles publicly. While we are nowhere done, we are getting better at keeping people in the loop, through our weekly community calls that are open to anyone, a shared P2PU calendar, and regular email and blog announcements about new developments and courses.

What’s next?

This post is intended as reflection of the past, but our trajectory over the last 12 months, says something about where we are going in the next year. At least two big goals: build out certification opportunities for our users, and start generating revenue. We have been successful obtaining grants, and there continues to be donor interest in supporting open learning projects, but I am particularly excited to work on opportunities for revenue generation in order to make us independently sustainable in the future.

Enough already. Thanks for reading all the way through. If any of this resonates, feel free to drop me a line, mention @sharingnicely on twitter, or leave a comment below.

Someone asked me to explain P2PU and School of Webcraft in an email. My description is always changing, this is what I came up with today:

P2PU is a community for learning about anything with peers. Right now we're focused on online learning groups (courses, study groups, book clubs, etc) but are definitely keen on facilitating communities in the real world. We're breaking the traditional model of top down (teachers / students) learning and making it simple to learn from each other. Aside from making learning from peers easy, we want to help members track and share their progress as well as motivate them to continue. We're even working on new forms of acknowledging skills. For the School of Webcraft we've partnered with Mozilla, a leader in web technology, to map web developer skills and provide competency based assessment. School of Webcraft is the first partnership of many that will leverage industry based brand recognition and trust to give value to credentials earned from peers at P2PU.

I was very excited when I first came across Dan Suther’s 2008 article "Empirical studies of the value of conceptually explicit notations in collaborative learning" in the book “Knowledge Cartography: Software tools and mapping techniques” (a book which is filled with other very interesting chapters as well). I had been acquainted with Knowledge Forum for several years, and also seen a few other graphical discourse environments, but never had any vocabulary for describing them, or taxonomy for analyzing the design, and how it could impact learning.

Suther’s article lays out a whole theory of how graphical discourse systems impact collaborative learning discourses, through the two concepts of salience and constraints, and runs a number of experiments with different systems to show the actual impact of the design changes. This was very refreshing to me, after having read a lot of Knowledge Building literature that mostly acted like the base design of Knowledge Forum was sacred, and never referred to other graphical discourse tools, or experimented with radical changes in the design to see how it impacted the learning process.

For week 5 of CSCL intro, I read both Suthers (2008), as well as an earlier paper from 2001, Towards a Systematic Study of Representational Guidance for Collaborative Learning Discourse, where he laid out his research agenda for the next few years, and touches on more of the theory behind his ideas. I’ve taken quite detailed noted, as usual, so I won’t spend this blog post trying to explain all of his ideas, but rather to bring up some of my questions, or ideas.

He cites a lot of interesting papers, and I plan to read many of them in the future – in fact, it’s just this kind of a situation that my wiki was made for. If reading the paper and highlighting / adding notes is first-order processing, and using the sidewiki to synthesis and write organized notes/key ideas is second-order processing, then the third-order is moving the ideas out of the individual article pages. I’d like to have a page, for example, on “salience”, which integrates the knowledge from all the articles I’ve read (with links back to the individual articles, of course).

Implementation

Many of Suther’s studies are laboratory studies, where two students sit in a room with one or two computer screens for an hour or two. This is an interesting design which allows him to test a number of different “configurations” with a large number of students in a relatively pure environment. However, a two-hour interaction is a poor substitute for a two week class section, or even an entire 12 week course. Even if we accept that certain forms of representational guidance help students think more systematically and deeply about issues, how do we implement them as part of a curriculum – what is the ideal balance between time spent online, time spent face to face (if it is a hybrid class), other instructional activities etc?

Suthers mentions two studies (Suthers, Toth & Weiner 1997; Toth et al 2002) which “developed comprehensive method for implementing Belvedere-supported collaborative inquiry in classroom”, and I look forward to reading them. I also hope to find other studies that can shed light on this issue.

Granularities of collaboration

I’ve previously discussed the idea of granularities of collaboration (1, 2). In most of the cases that Suthers’ experiments with, the granularity of collaboration is extremely low – there are two people who directly interact, and immediately express their ideas, etc. In the asynchronous cases, there might be a little bit more individual processing before posting, but it is still likely to be minimal.

However, most courses are not conducted in dyads, what happens when there area many more participants? Perhaps there are sub-groups (as happens naturally when two or more students share computers and work on an artefact, like is common with Knowledge Building)? Or there might go days between each time people contribute, and they might do a substantial amount of processing individually, either in their head (what Suthers calls “cognitive operations” from Zhang (2007)), or even externally, taking notes or drawing up a diagram, before posting something to the central artefact (“perceptual operations”).

Suthers writes that: “People construct representations together, elements of the representation becomes imbued with meanings for the participants by virtue of having been produced through the negotiation mentioned above.” This was what prompted my question above – I am thinking of for example people who were unable to participate in an Etherpad meeting, who look through the log and look at the finished artefact. They can still access the same representation, but they don’t have the same shared memory.

I wonder if there are ways of overcoming this – Etherpad for example, provides a “playback mode”, so you can see how the artefact took form (although right now, the chat is not replayed in sync, which would be useful). Or you could even imagine someone doing a screencast with the replay tool, providing a narrative voice-over of how the group arrived at a certain point.

(These reflections were also prompted by the fact that I often find diagrams, flowcharts or mind maps in academic articles or blogs very difficult to understand, and often prefer narrative explanations. Clearly, diagrams work very differently if you constructed them yourself, or if you are looking at somebody else’s finished product. )

Representational guidance literacy

Suthers’ (2008) concludes that:

System designers should treat representational design as design of resources for conversation between learners.

A designer or teacher might ask:

• What activities does a given representational notation suggest or prompt for?
• Do the actions that can be performed on a shared representation in this notation correspond to the potential ideas that we want learners to negotiate and distinctions we want them to attend to?
• Do the resulting representations express and make salient the ideas and relationships that learners should revisit and relate to new information?
• Are the needs that should be addressed by subsequent activity, such the lack of information, made obvious?
• Do the representations capture important aspects of learners’ thinking and expose conflicts between alternative solutions or perspectives?
• Stepping beyond the scope of the studies reported here, one might ask: does the notation provide the preferred vocabularies and representational perspectives that constitute both the target skill to be learned as an aspiring member of a community, and focus learning activity on ways of approaching a problem that are productive?

Does this mean that it would be useful to develop a range of different tools, or even tools that were configurable by teachers, to suit different instructional methods and subject areas? Let’s say a tool that you could easily configure to show node-links, with a chat that was deictically indexed for one task, and for another task, you used Knowledge Forum, for a third task a week later, you used an Excel spreadsheet with theories and proofs on different columns – this would be a very different approach from the “one-size-fits-all” of for example Knowledge Forum.

Gan (2010) suggests that the use of graphical discourse toools, such as Knowledge Forum, can help students gain “graphical literacy”.

Graphical literacy involves a range of visual thinking and communication skills (Jolliffe, 1991) and the ability to use graphic tools to construct, present, read, and interpret charts, maps, graphs, and other visual presentations (e.g., spreadsheets, timelines, cartoons, photographs) that supplement prose in textbooks, nonfiction trade-­‐books, and newspapers (Readence, Bean & Baldwin, 2004).

Visual thinking is defined as processing information through images or graphics instead of words (Olson, 1992) and graphical representations help support and externalize visual thinking, aiding creative problem solving and intellectual development. Visual thinking is a fundamental and unique part of our perceptual system aiding in the construction of mental models that can lead to productive thinking and learning (West, 1997) and supporting verbal and symbolic forms of expression (McLoughlin & Krakowski, 2001).

I wonder if the use of a number of different graphical discourse systems can make students meta-cognitively aware of the salience and constraints of these different systems, and if so, what the effect would be on the learning.

This could be furthered by students not only being exposed to these different systems during teacher-initiated group work, but also using various ways of externalizing and systematizing their knowledge individually (mind mapping, etc). Ideally, this would be a skill that students could bring with them throughout life.

Visual salience and cognition

I am fascinated by the distinction between “direct perception”, which requires automatic computation, but no executive control (such as the color of a node), and other perception, such as whether a node is connected to another node, which requires active visual search. It is a fascinating perspective to use for analyzing different discourse platforms, and also thinking about new ways of representing knowledge (I dream about a room with gigantic touch screens, so that I can put all my different ideas up there, drag them from one room to the next, etc – there is something very powerful about “seeing everything” at the same time).

Introduction

P2PU courses typically consist of an asynchronous and a synchronous part. The asynchronous part is all the work that is done throughout the week, reading articles, posting blog posts, or comments on the site, collaborating on a wiki article, etc. The synchronous part is usually the “mass-meeting”, where all the participants who are able to make it, “meet” at a common time. I wrote a short paper for a course last year about the different elements of synchronous communications, and I tried to extract the most relevant ideas on a wiki page.

There I listed the following “uses” of synchronous meetings at P2PU:

I’m back in the game!

Due to a number of circumstances, I was absent from the course for about two weeks. This was much longer than I had planned, and I apologize for it. I am also very grateful to Monica for her great work in the interim. It feels great to be back, seeing the energy of the course, and getting back into it.

It was quite overwhelming to re-enter the course after two weeks, which made me think about is how we can help people who “fall off” a course get back on. Related to this, I sent gentle messages to a number of core participants who haven’t been very active, inviting them to rejoin us, we’ll see if anyone takes me up on it.

My initial instinct would be to start with the readings in week 2, and slowly work through everything to “catch up”. However, experience has taught me that that might not be the best way – while you are busy catching up, the course marches forward, and you might never be able to get back on the train. So I focused on the readings for week 4, and intend to go back and “backfill” once I get time.

Weekly meeting

I’m moving this up to make sure you see it. This week, we propose to meet at 6PM EST (which will be 6AM here in China, but I’m in a village where everyone gets up early) in Etherpad. This time, we will try to combine whole-group discussion in Etherpad with one-on-one (dyadic) discussion in Skype, so please have your Skype ready, and add your Skype name to the Etherpad. It would be very helpful if you had at least read one of the weekly articles before coming to the meeting (to help the discussion).

This week’s theme

We had two quite challenging, but very rich readings this week, from two key members of the field:

• Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C.  (2006).  Knowledge building: Theory, pedagogy, and technology. In K. Sawyer (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (pp. 97-118).  New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Stahl, G. (2002). Contributions to a theoretical framework for CSCL, Proceedings of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL 2002), Boulder, CO, pp. 62-71.

So far, I think I am the only one who has blogged about these two readings, on Scardamalia and on Stahl. I also took quite extensive notes on both articles, so if you haven’t read them yet, those might be helpful to you (I’ve been playing a lot with my new wiki, which I will blog about more later).

There were two supplementary readings:

• A Special Issue of the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology on Knowledge Buildling (Fall 2010)(36)1. (all articles available).
• Zhang, J., Scardamalia, S., Reeve, R., & Messina, R. (2009). Designs for Collective Cognitive Responsibility in Knowledge-Building Communities, Journal of the Learning Sciences (18),1, 7-44

Jennifer provided a summary of the Zhang et al. article, apparently especially dedicated to Martin :)

Last week

Many of the contributions this week have still be catching up with last week’s theme. Monica made a really neat idea map of the course so far. Martin discussed the mycorrhizae paper and asked how a social network of doctors could be formed, with the challenge of medical privacy. A very nice discussion occurred in the comments.

Incidentally, one of the challenges of blog-based courses is the comments – how will you know about this discussion, if you a) read the blog in your Google Reader, or b) read it at first, before all the comments, and never go back to it? Hopefully, the distributed social web will eventually enable the P2PU site to solve this problem.

Martin also blogged about a large undergraduate course he will be teaching online in the fall. How can ideas from this course help him make the course better? A great challenge to all of us, feel free to jump in with ideas!

Related to the idea of creating a manifesto, Marcy posted a link to the World Economics Forum manifesto. There was also some discussion about Nate Otto’s very neat visualization of the Etherpad discussion.

Other related blog posts

Apart from the course readings, I blogged about my notes from AERA 11, and a presentation I gave called Grappling with ideas. Both of these are relevant to the course topic.

Activity on the site

On the discussion on the weekly task, Monica proposed a number of guiding questions, including an encouragement to use debate graph to answer “Some believe that Knowledge Building pedagogy as Scardamalia describes it here is not realistic for a traditional classroom setting. Do you agree? What are the major barriers and how do you see non-traditional settings as either challenging or reinforcing these barriers?”. Nobody has taken her up on that challenge yet.

She also linked to a PowerPoint explaining Knowledge Building to teachers. Marcy described the content of this course to someone who works for the Prince of Wales(!), and Jennifer’s whole family is down with the flu (we wish you rapid recovery!).

Have a great week, try to catch up with readings, although I know we’re all busy, and see you on Saturday!

Stian

Thanks to the generous recommendation by Zaid Ali Alsagoff, George Siemens invited me to give a talk to the Connectivism 2011 MOOC. I decided that instead of giving a talk about something I know and have thought a lot about, like open access or OER, I would try to challenge myself by proposing a topic that I was in the middle of grappling with, where I really didn’t know where I was going or what my conclusion would be. It’s quite scary to be giving a presentation on something that is so “raw” in your mind, but I figured the CCK11 crowd was the perfect crowd for it, and the preparation of the slides helped me really gather my thoughts.

I have thought a lot about how we think and work with ideas, individually, in small groups online, in face-to-face workshops, and in distributed networks. There seemed to me to be something fundamentally similar with approaches to mind-mapping and note taking, collaborative discourse tools like Knowledge Forum and Compendium, innovative workshop methodologies like Unconferences and Open Space methodology, and visualizations and sensemaking of massive amounts of networked data… Yet whenever I read about one of these dimensions, they never seem to mention the others. So I tried to map out some of the overlapping areas, and principles that seem to apply.

This is something that I would love people’s feedback on, but despite the fact that we have both an Elluminate recording, an MP3, as well as a Vimeo recording, I knew that many are too busy to sit through a 45+ minute presentation. I wanted to do something similar to what I did with my presentation on OER and multicultural students, where I exported all the slides into PNGs, added them to a blog entry, and then added text – both from the talk, and from other sources – around the pictures. It became a massive blog entry, but I got some very positive feedback on it.

Lately, I have been playing around with a wiki to keep my notes. It’s a DokuWiki installation, and I will write more about the specific setup later – I’ve tweaked it quite a bit, and am becoming quite happy with it, but there are still a few more things to do. Anyway, I decided to try to do it in the wiki instead, both because it’s much easier to handle so many pictures (just resize them with Automator, move them to the media directory, and create a file with {{idea001.png}, {{idea002.png}} etc, and then type the relevant text around those image links.

This turned out to work excellently. See my extended notes here. The other advantage is that I can add links to wikipages on people or theories that I discuss. Currently, many of these are placeholders, because I’ve just gotten started, but eventually I’d like these pages to link to their most important articles, my  notes from those articles, etc. (And already, there are some pages offering a lot more depth, like the one on tagging, which I extracted from an online course I was doing this winter, or the one on monologic and dialogic learning, where you can both see my organized notes, and the raw notes from reading the article.

I later wrote a paper for a course, where I also tried to process some of these ideas. This was my first paper written with Multi-Markdown, using Pandoc to process the Bibtex bibliography (I’ll write more about these things later too). The nice thing about this, was that I could then use Pandoc to convert the Markdown document to Mediawiki markup, which is very similar to DokuWiki. Thus I was able to publish the entire paper as a very nicely formatted wiki page. Much nicer than PDF, if you ask me!

Hopefully you’ll find the talk interesting, whichever format you consume it in, and I would love to hear ideas on how to take my thinking further, especially if you know about anyone who has been looking at all these different levels before – seems to me that most thinkers concentrate on one, whether it’s Tony Buzan and his mind mapping (individual), or Marlene Scardamalia and her knowledge building, etc.

Stian
PS: You’ll notice a tiny little icon behind links to the wiki. I’ll probably be keeping more of the notes that I would have otherwise published on my blog, on the wiki, in the future, but I’ll blog about it so that it arrives in your feed reader.