When teaching-learning interactions are working well, learners and teachers are constructing together ("co-constructing") a common ground of meaning to understand (make sense of) the topics they explore. These sense-making activities involve a great deal of what linguists call "referential practice"—pointing to and using linguistic expressions that refer to the conceptual entities around which learning is happening. When learning scientists describe learning as "the negotiation of meaning," the image is one in which different understandings of a concept or situation that the teacher and learner may have are revealed through such sense-making discussions. Empirical research on learning interactions indicates that these highly interactive and multimodal conversations around ever changing "conversational props" are commonplace. When people learn together face-to-face, or engage interactively with a mentor or teacher, there is often a rich interchange of visual and verbal representations—drawings, diagrams, and discussions about them, for example. These activities, in turn, are referenced with gestures (e.g., pointing), annotations, markings (e.g., circling or underlining), linguistic labels, and other representations that function to direct participants' attention. Multiple "layers" of representation quickly accumulate in this process of interpretation, knowledge construction, and learning.
The community tools theme addresses technological tools that facilitate these types of interactive learning processes. We foresee such tools as advancing what we might call the "communication infrastructure" for multiple participants in a learning situation to be fluidly expressing knowledge or beliefs through symbolic representations, interpreting these representations, and building a cumulative knowledge product. We envision collaborative representation tools that allow for easily creating, editing, annotating, linking, and displaying drawings, equations, graphs, spreadsheets, models, and video records during the process of communication. Examples include active simulations in which control can be exchanged among remote participants, mathematical notations that are linked to graphs that plot them, layering of annotations on such simulations and notations, and annotated video records that highlight exemplary aspects of a teaching strategy or the surfacing of a student misconception. We are interested in how education can benefit from the concepts, models, and prototypes of business groupware applications and scientific "collaboratories" or the well-motivated use of shared video in these media-rich, networked, interpersonal workspaces.
Towards these ends, our theme has sponsored several seed projects related to collaborative representations. The Interoperable Components for Shared Active Representations (ICSAR) project developed a set of ideal tool use scenarios across multiple subject areas. The Media Rich Annotations for Learning team explored a host of socio-technical issues around the use of digital video annotation tools for learning in a museum and other settings. Finally, The Digital Video Inquiry Collaboratory organized a face-to-face workshop and built a community-oriented website to enhance the development of digital video tools and records to support learning science research and teacher education.
Seed grants and related work:
Interoperable Components for Shared Active Representations
seed grant
http://lilt.ics.hawaii.edu/icsar/
http://lilt.ics.hawaii.edu/lilt/software/belvedere/index.html
Media Rich Annotations for Learning
seed grant
http://depts.washington.edu/pettt/projects/videotraces.html
The Digital Video Inquiry Collaboratory
http://cilt.stanford.edu (registration is required)