Disagreeing About the Problem in PBL: How Students Negotiate Disagreements Regarding the Problem in PBL

An essential part of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is the students’ groupwork. What happens in students’ group work when no tutor/facilitator is present is normally a hidden land. Thus, there is limited research on students’ interactional way of doing PBL, this study tries to amend this by looking at how students conduct group work without any tutor/facilitator present. In this study, our research question is: How do students negotiate disagreements in their decision-making regarding their problem construction, and which element(s) in the interaction establishes if the decision is made or not? With a focus on students’ interactional work, we used video-observation to gather data of a 3rd semester Engineering Group at Aalborg University, Denmark. Our findings indicate that the conversation's structure has a profound impact on whether a decision proposal is accepted. Thus, the individual’s ability to hold on to their position and answer questions towards one’s proposal determines if other group members follow your suggestion. The study provides knowledge to an under-researched area of PBL and recommends a focus on PBL students’ interactional work in relation to near future cases of PBL

Engineering Students’ Dynamic And Fluid Group Practices In A Collaborative Design Project

There is a growing interest in engineering education that the curriculum should include collaborative design projects. Collaboration and collaborative learning imply a shared activity, a shared purpose, a joint problem-solving space, and mutual interdependence to achieve intended learning outcomes. The focus, in this study, is 1 Corresponding Author J Bernhard [email protected] on engineering students’ collaborative group practices. The context is a design project in the fifth semester of the problem-based Architecture and Design programme at Aalborg University. Students’ collaborative work in the preparation for an upcoming status seminar was video recorded in situ. In our earlier studies video ethnography, conversation analysis and embodied interaction analysis have been used to explore what interactional work the student teams did and what kind of resources they used to collaborate and complete the design task on a momentmoment basis. In this paper we report from a one-hour period where a group of four engineering students do final designs in preparation for the status seminar. Using recorded multi-perspective videos, we have analysed students’ fine-grained patterns of social interaction within this group. We found that the interaction and collaboration was very dynamic and fluid. It was observed that students seamlessly switched from working individually to working collaboratively. In collaborative work students frequently changed constellations and would not only work as a whole group, but also would break into subgroups of two or three students to do some work. Our results point to the need to investigate group practices and individual and collaborative learning in design project groups and other collaborative learning environments in more detail and the results challenge a naïve individualcollaborative-binary

IS “DIGITAL EDUCATION” THE RIGHT WAY FORWARD? – OR IS, MAYBE, POSTDIGITAL EDUCATION WHAT IS NEEDED!

The use of “digital tools” have usually played an important role in the transformation to “emergency remote teaching” during the pandemic. However, even before the pandemic there has been a strong pressure that education should become more “digital”. Nevertheless, we see several problems associated with the present discourse related to “digitalisation” of education. 1) It often unclear what is meant with “digital education”, 2) very narrow view of “digital tools” too mainly be tools for information and communication neglecting other uses of digital technology, 3) unbalanced focus on “digital tools” there other tools are either neglected or seen as inherently inferior and “old-fashioned”, 4) conflation between “digital” and “distance”, 5) adherence to either a technological determinism or a pedagogical determinism (technology is a neutral tool). Engineering students’ courses of action have been videorecorded in design projects and in electronics labs at two universities. It can bee seen that students’ use a wealth of bodily-material resources that are an integral and seamless part of students’ interactions. They use bodily resources, concrete materials, “low-tech” inscriptions as well as “high-tech” (“digital”) inscription devices. Our results challenge that by hand – by computer and analogue tools – digital tools should be seen as dichotomies. Our empirical evidence suggests that students should be trained to not only be trained to work with “digital” tools but with a multitude of tools and resources. We, thus, advocate that a postdigital perspective should be taken in education where the digital makes up part of an integrated totality

Adapting Interaction Analysis to CSCL: a systematic review

Interaction Analysis (IA) (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) is a fundamental reference in the learning sciences, and a core method within the International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. Surprisingly, despite the vast number of citations and labs around the world practicing forms of interaction analysis, there have been few if any substantial efforts to articulate its central premises in the context of CSCL. Following a systematic review method, the purpose of this preliminary study is to provide an overview and foundation for investigating the ways that IA has been interpreted and applied in the field of CSCL. Our findings suggest that IA has been applied in a variety of computer-mediated learning contexts and arrangements which have required extending and adapting the method in novel ways. Our broader goal is to consider ongoing methodological and technological developments for the future directions of interaction analysis within CSCL