| Project | Emergent structures for conversations and communities: Helping students visualize where a discussion is going |
| Contact | Alex Cuthbert U.C. Berkeley |
| alx@socrates.berkeley.edu | |
| URL | http://wise.berkeley.edu |
| Project description | Emergent structures for conversations and communities: Helping students visualize where a discussion is going (Alex Cuthbert, Jim Slotta, Marcia Linn) Innovation is not always the result of a mathematical dream about snakes eating their tails. More often innovation comes from applying accepted approaches to novel situations and gaining insights from how things work (or fail to work, as the case may be). The techniques presented here contribute to the field of educational research by refining advances in engineering design environments and applying them to communities of learners. The particular processes we chose to emphasize rely on the visualization of convergence within discussions. Helping students recognize and reconcile different perspectives on a problem has been a challenge in both engineering (Conklin, 1988; Nagy, Ullman, & Dietterich, 1992) and education (Scardemalia & Berieter, 1991). Creating visualizations that represent the trajectory of a discussion can help turn emergent goals into resources that can support future action (Guindon, 1990). One of the most important innovations in our community system is that we do not specify the structure of conversations beforehand. Rather, the comments that students make enable certain actions and alternative representations. If students are debating a theory, a representation highlighting the two sides of the theory may emerge with condensed text or links pointing to supporting evidence. If students are working on a design project, different design decisions and rationales might appear with the most important factors percolating to the top of the discussion. The challenge met by this approach is to help students decompose the problem without obscuring the larger idea being developed. The benefit for students using dynamically reconfigured discussion environments is that the representations are aligned with the processes and activities they support. By creating visualizations that reflect the process of negotiation, students are able to see which comments are credible to their peers. These productive comments should be engaged more frequently and, we expect, comments like them will appear more often. |