S-COL: A Copernican turn for the development of flexibly reusable collaboration scripts

Collaboration scripts are usually implemented as parts of a particular collaborative-learning platform. Therefore, scripts of demonstrated effectiveness are hardly used with learning platforms at other sites, and replication studies are rare. The approach of a platform-independent description language for scripts that allows for easy implementation of the same script on different platforms has not succeeded yet in making the transfer of scripts feasible. We present an alternative solution that treats the problem as a special case of providing support on top of diverse Web pages: In this case, the challenge is to trigger support based on the recognition of a Web page as belonging to a specific type of functionally equivalent pages such as the search query form or the results page of a search engine. The solution suggested has been implemented by means of a tool called S-COL (Scripting for Collaborative Online Learning) and allows for the sustainable development of scripts and scaffolds that can be used with a broad variety of content and platforms. The tool’s functions are described. In order to demonstrate the feasibility and ease of script reuse with S-COL, we describe the flexible re-implementation of a collaboration script for argumentation in S-COL and its adaptation to different learning platforms. To demonstrate that a collaboration script implemented in S-COL can actually foster learning, an empirical study about the effects of a specific script for collaborative online search on learning activities is presented. The further potentials and the limitations of the S-COL approach are discussed

Planning Collaborative Learning in Virtual Environments. La planificación del aprendizaje colaborativo en entornos virtuales

Collaborative learning has a strong presence in technologysupported education and, as a result, practices being developed in the form of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) are more and more common. Planning seems to be one of the critical issues when elaborating CSCL proposals, which necessarily take into account technological resources, methodology and group configuration as a means to boost exchange and learning in the community. The purpose of this study is to analyze the relevance of the CSCL planning phase and weigh up the significance of its key design components as well as examining group agreement typology and its usefulness in team building and performance. To do so, research was carried out using a nonexperimental quantitative methodology consisting of a questionnaire answered by 106 undergraduate students from 5 different CSCLbased subjects. Results prove the usefulness of the planning components and the drafting of group agreements and their influence on group building and interaction. In order to ensure the quality of learning, it is essential to plan CSCL initiatives properly and understand that organizational, pedagogical and technological decisions should converge around a single goal which is to sustain the cognitive and social aspects that configure individual and group learning

Seis enfoques teórico-metodológicos para analizar textos escritos en un curso de aprendizaje combinado de un año

Virtual environment interaction has been studied from different theoretical-methodological approaches. The purpose of this paper is to describe written texts characteristics of a blended delivered course and to analyze six theoretical systems contrasting them with data. The collected data was composed by all the texts written in Moodle by the teacher in an annual course. The variables were set up from six approaches (coding systems): (a)- Communities of inquiry; (b)- Teaching assistance dimensions; (c)- Macro and micro-scripting; (d)- Twelve ways of teaching; (e)- Rethinking the class; and (f)- Observation record. Reliability and multivariable analyses were performed. Results showed different consistency of approaches contrasting them with data. Texts analyzed revealed how interaction took place and showed pedagogical issues underlying the didactic proposals. Associations among variables categories produced three typical groups of texts related with the different variables from theoretical-methodological coding systems used: Cluster 1 gathered general instructions; Cluster 2 illustrated the virtual environment usage as repository; and Cluster 3 represented the tutorial interactivity. Future studies should deep in the approaches exposed contrasting them with new data to get a better understanding of sociocognitive interaction among students and teachers in blended learning delivered courses.La interacción del entorno virtual ha sido estudiada desde diferentes enfoques teórico-metodológicos. El propósito de este artículo es describir las características de los textos escritos en un curso de aprendizaje combinado y analizar seis sistemas teóricos que los contrastan con los datos. Los datos recopilados son de todos los textos escritos en Moodle por el profesor en un curso de un año. Las variables se configuraron a partir de seis enfoques (sistemas de codificación): (a) - Comunidades de investigación; (b) - Dimensiones de la asistencia docente; (c) - Macro y micro-scripting; (d) - Doce formas de enseñar; (e) - Repensando la clase; y (f) - Registro de observación. Se realizaron análisis de fiabilidad y multivariables. Los resultados mostraron diferente consistencia de los enfoques. Los textos analizados revelaron cómo tuvo lugar la interacción y mostraron problemas pedagógicos subyacentes a las propuestas didácticas. Las asociaciones entre categorías produjeron tres grupos típicos de textos relacionados con las diferentes variables de los sistemas de codificación teóricometodológicos utilizados: el grupo 1 reunió instrucciones generales; El cluster 2 ilustra el uso del entorno virtual como repositorio; y Cluster 3 representó la interactividad tutorial. Los estudios futuros deben continuar explorando estos enfoques, contrastándolos con datos nuevos, y viceversa, para obtener una mejor comprensión de la interacción sociocognitiva entre estudiantes y maestros en el aprendizaje combinado.Fil: Borgobello, Ana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Rosario. Instituto Rosario de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Educación. Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Instituto Rosario de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Educación; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Rosario; ArgentinaFil: Espinosa, Andrea Pía. Universidad Nacional de Rosario; ArgentinaFil: Sartori, Mariana. Universidad Nacional de Rosario; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Rosario. Instituto Rosario de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Educación. Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Instituto Rosario de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Educación; Argentin

Developing the role concept for computer-supported collaborative learning

The role concept has attracted a lot of attention as a construct for facilitating and analysing interactions in the context of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). So far much of this research has been carried out in isolation and the focus on roles lacks cohesion. In this article we present a conceptual framework to synthesise the contemporary conceptualisation of roles, by discerning three levels of the role concept: micro (role as task), meso (role as pattern) and macro (role as stance). As a first step to further conceptualise ‘role as a stance’, we present a framework of eight participative stances defined along three dimensions: group size, orientation and effort. The participative stances – Captain, Over-rider, Free-rider, Ghost, Pillar, Generator, Hanger-on and Lurker – were scrutinised on two data sets using qualitative analysis. The stances aim to facilitate meaningful description of student behaviour, stimulate both teacher and student awareness of roles at the macro-level in terms of participative stances, and evaluate or possibly change the participation to collaborative learning on all levels

Roles for structuring groups for collaboration

The emergence of productive collaboration benefits from support for group interaction. Structuring is a broad way to refer to such support, as part of which roles have become a boundary object in computer-supported collaborative learning. The term structuring is related to—yet distinct from—other approaches to support such as scaffolding, structured interdependence, and scripting. Roles can be conceived as a specific (set of) behavior(s) that can be taken up by an individual within a group. They can be assigned in advance or emerge during group interaction. Roles raise individual group member’s awareness of their own and fellow group member’s responsibilities, and they make an individual’s responsibilities toward the group’s functioning visible for all group members. In future research, pedagogical issues with respect to role design, assignment, and rotation as well as automated detection and visualization of emergent roles, should be addressed

'Is This Student Voice?' Students and Teachers Re-negotiate Power through Governance Partnerships in the Classroom

A change in status for students to position them influentially as educational decision-makers with teachers is identified as a key dimension of student voice research and pedagogy. Despite over 30 years of student voice research and pedagogical practice, this change in student status remains problematic. Accountability agendas associated with neo-liberalism intermingle with student voice ideals contributing to contradictory purposes for, and in some cases diminutive instantiations of, student voice research and practice. This tension often renders student influence illusory, fleeting or difficult to sustain. Greater theorising of the power dynamics at work in enacting ongoing student influence in pedagogical and curriculum design, that also takes account of expectations and demands on teachers’ practice, is called for. This research contributes to this challenge. Three teachers and their Year Seven and Eight students within one intermediate school collaborated across a three-cycle action research project to identify and utilise student perceptions of effective teaching and engagement as a basis for co-constructing responsive and reciprocal pedagogy as governance partners. The teachers met regularly to plan and reflect on aspects of enacting the teacher/student governance partnerships in their classes, collaborating to ensure that aspects of teacher voice were addressed in the process of enacting student voice. A student research group of 12 students drawn from the three participating classes provided ongoing reflection and insight into classroom power dynamics as the research unfolded. Teacher/student ‘governance partnerships’ were enacted as a way to maximise student influence within classroom-based pedagogy and curriculum decision-making. A power analytic framework was developed to theorise the relationships between voice and power by mashing Lukes’ three-dimensional theory of faced power with Foucault’s micro-physics of power and theories of discourse and discourse analysis. Three findings emerged from this research. Firstly the research established that the vantage point from which student voice practice was experienced influenced how that practice was perceived. Teachers were more certain that their co-constructive action research work with students represented student voice in action because the students demonstrated behaviour teachers identified with student voice. Participatory strategies enacted within the action research meant that student talk and reflection about their learning and themselves as learners increased. Teachers gained valuable insight into their students as learners as well as the efficacy of their teaching from this student talk. As teachers came to increasingly trust their students’ contributions, students’ thinking came to influence teachers’ thinking and the student voice curriculum in the three classrooms. Students from their vantage point were more ambivalent in their evaluation of these same actions. Although they appreciated having a say in deciding aspects of the classroom programme, they identified pedagogical decision-making as a clear responsibility for teachers who they perceived were professionally trained for this responsibility. Secondly, the power analytic frame developed for the research illuminated visible and less visible aspects of how power dynamics influenced teachers’ and students’ action as governance partners. Persistent tensions between co-construction and accountability agendas meant that teachers and students were constrained in their student voice action by school expectations and macro accountability demands. However they were able to negotiate ways to address these constraints, largely in ways that accommodated rather than challenged them. Thirdly the shift in power dynamics between teachers and students in the research classrooms generated spaces conducive to the emergence of a student discourse on student voice. Students identified the importance of knowing and being known as learners by their peers, rather than being motivated to establish influential relationships with teachers. This student-student collaboration theme pushes back against adult-centric student voice discourses focused on increasing the influence of students in conventionally teacher-dominated decision-making domains. Implications from this research suggest that although building student influence in classrooms as a means to elevate their status as governance partners with teachers is necessary, student voice practice and research needs to look beyond the classroom to bring taken-for-granted elements of school culture expectations, and how these constrain classroom possibilities for action, into the student voice agenda. Teachers and researchers need also to consider how their conceptions of student voice are imposed within the context of compulsory classwork on students. The power analytic frame developed for this research may assist students, teachers, policy makers and researchers to keep the problematic nature of student voice in schools to the forefront as they plan, implement and critically reflect on classroom and school student voice initiatives to scaffold student influence within the educative process

Models for Learning (Mod4L) Final Report: Representing Learning Designs

The Mod4L Models of Practice project is part of the JISC-funded Design for Learning Programme. It ran from 1 May – 31 December 2006. The philosophy underlying the project was that a general split is evident in the e-learning community between development of e-learning tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most effectively, and is impeding uptake of new tools and methods by teachers. To help overcome this barrier and bridge the gap, a need is felt for practitioner-focused resources which describe a range of learning designs and offer guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability (see, for example, Griffiths and Blat 2005, JISC 2006). Practice models, it was suggested, were such a resource. The aim of the project was to: develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. We worked with two definitions of practice models. Practice models are: 1. generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices (JISC 2006) However, however effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse at the heart of JISC’s Design for Learning programme. Thus practice models should be both representations of effective practice, and effective representations of practice. Hence we arrived at the project working definition of practice models as: 2. Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc).(Mod4L working definition, Falconer & Littlejohn 2006). A learning design is defined as the outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme (JISC 2006). Practice models have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning, editing and running the designs. The project took a practitioner-centred approach, working in close collaboration with a focus group of 12 teachers recruited across a range of disciplines and from both FE and HE. Focus group members are listed in Appendix 1. Information was gathered from the focus group through two face to face workshops, and through their contributions to discussions on the project wiki. This was supplemented by an activity at a JISC pedagogy experts meeting in October 2006, and a part workshop at ALT-C in September 2006. The project interim report of August 2006 contained the outcomes of the first workshop (Falconer and Littlejohn, 2006). The current report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). All quotations are taken from the Mod4L wiki unless otherwise stated

STIMULATING DIGITAL LITERACY PARTICIPATIONS’ FRAMEWORKS: INNOVATIVE AND COLLABORATIVE LANGUAGE PROJECTS

This paper highlights educators’ innovativeness as digital participants and facilitators adapting themselves in current global educational changes as upshots of technological fusion that influences instructional variation for learners’ real–world. It is perceived that teachers’ flexibility to evolving trends in current instructions is crucial. It is fundamentally a structured expository concept on teachers and students’ development reinforced by theories and researches’ investigated outcomes toward the challenges of emerging pedagogic phenomena sustained by model project- tasks designed for innovative, collaborative and digital literacy participations. This inquisition attempts to respond to the succeeding inquiries: Why do educators innovate in the 21st century? Is professional development necessary to situate contemporary learning? What are the roles of technology and digital literacy for innovative and collaborative instructions? What are the features of digital literacy and digital participations and how do participants pragmatically engage? What are some collaborative and innovative projects that define digital participations? Are these tasks sustained by current and duly sanctioned educational principles and frameworks? Do these tasks conform to the scope of integrated digital literacy taxonomy framework? Do the framework and principles produce practical assessment of outcomes to improve future project-based tasks? An empirical investigation is recommended to test the significance and correlation among students’ project performance towards their attitudes and efficacy on digital literacy.  Article visualizations

Learners’ language use during task-based peer interaction in second language class of primary school

This study sets out to explore Second Language (L2) learners’ language use during peer interaction for performing L2 tasks in the primary L2 classroom from the sociocultural perspective. Professional and pedagogical impetus for an enquiry into L2 learners’ language use is provided by the dilemma caused by the gap between an L2 only policy and classroom practice. The issue of L2 learners’ use of L1 within L2 classrooms has been a controversial topic in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), yet to date there has been little research conducted in the primary L2 learning contexts. Therefore, there was a need to examine the actual language use of L2 learners in the primary L2 classroom to gain pedagogical insights and implications related to learners’ language use. To this end, this study conducted a collective case study in intact primary L2 classrooms of two different institutional types: English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes at a state primary school in Seoul, and Korean as a Heritage Language (KHL) classes at a Korean Saturday School in London. Multiple evidence of learners’ language use was gathered and analysed via thematic analysis in terms of distinct features and overall functions. The findings reveal that primary L2 learners frequently codeswitched their language, i.e. shifted their linguistic code between L1 and L2, as budding bilingual speakers; used language strategically through repetition; and used the economy of language through interjections, onomatopoeias, and hesitation fillers. The findings also provide evidence that learners’ language mediated the completion of L2 tasks, serving communicative, cognitive, and socio-affective functions on the interpersonal or the intrapersonal plane. These findings call for several pedagogical reconsiderations: reconceptualising views of L2 learners from imperfect monolinguals to developing bilinguals; reconsidering pedagogical decisions on the L2 only policy; improving L2 textbooks and instructional resources; developing balanced L2 tasks between learners’ L2 competence and cognitive development; enriching and expanding learners’ vocabulary; and finally enhancing teachers’ teaching practice in order to bridge the gap between the policy and learners’ use of language