INFO 608 Reflections, R. Porter06/09/081 of 1

I was intrigued by Drexel’s online MSLIS program because it was completely online and I was attracted by the CSCL research interest of some of its faculty. A few years before enrolling here, I was also intrigued as I imagined the user experience from the description of Germany’s Virtual Global University, School of Business Informatics, It too offered a completely online, multimedia educational experience. I have an abiding interest in innovative approaches to education and in collaborative learning.

Earlier in this class, INFO 608, I wrote about my disappointment with my experience of Drexel’s Blackboard online service after 5 consecutive quarters and 7 classes. I had hoped for a more interactive and collaborative experience than the one I got. I was hopeful and excited after reading the syllabus for this class—it would use something other than Blackboard and its subject was CSCL. It has been an enlightening and worthwhile experience. I now have a better sense of and perspective about the challenges of implementing CSCL effectively.

I am quite fond of retrospectives. I often attempt them as thought experiments at the beginning of a project or planned experience. However, nothing beats lived experience in retrospect. On several occasions during the last 10 weeks I have returned to the course welcome page and the course overview when negotiating with my team on what to do next or clarifying what do we need to do now. This seems only natural or as expected. Yet, in the frustration of the moment and given the pedagogical and software tool novelty, the instructions, goals, or guidance get lost and don’t seem to inform our choices.

One important observation I made about this class early on is that most of us seemed to associate collaboration with synchronous interaction only. We lost time trying to meet and experienced some frustration by not taking advantage of other asynchronous modes such as the wiki. However, the expectation for using the wiki technology was clearly stated on the course welcome page:

This quarter, we are using wiki technology heavily, because it seems like a potentially good medium for knowledge-building social interaction—although it needs a lot more functionality. The course will take place primarily in this wiki—with synchronous sessions taking place in the VMT chat environment.

Many times on my team I encouraged others to use the wiki for sharing ideas and posting questions for discussion. I found and shared the (Cress & Kimmerle, 2008) article in my effort to encourage collaboration through the wiki. We had success with posting but failed to use the wiki in the most collaborative way. Most of us seemed to have great reluctance or resistance to editing one another’s work. It seems some of the resistance came from being extreme novices with wiki editing. I developed an easy facility and an acknowledged resourcefulness with it yet, what I know I learned in this class within the first weeks.

I believe it would be useful in the future to position, prominently, the expectation for using the wiki technology in the first week of this course. Fairly, you could argue as I did that the expectation was prominent—it was on the welocme page. I think (Cress & Kimmerle, 2008) succeed in offering a model to help “better understand collaborative knowledge building with wikis.” Having a discussion of this article along with others as a means to fulfill the expectation could have the desired effect.

I enjoyed the selected readings for this class. I believe I can rightfully claim to have succceeded in the objective: to “find and interpret research literature in the general areas of study within the field of human-computer interaction.” The readings provided a useful overview of the field of CSCL research, its promise and its challenges. It was a good idea to apply the discipline of interaction design to a project focused on the needs of the CSCL research community. The readings suggested a framework to attain another objective: to “analyze the interaction between people, the work they do, the information systems they use, and the environments in which they work and learn.” However, I believe we suffered unresolved confusion about the subject and intended learning from this class. Was it about CSCL research and its findings or was it about interaction design with the needs of the CSCL research community as its subject of concern. I argue and argued that it’s the latter.

My feeling is that, for the design project, we somehow missed the problem statement and its clarity. It was included in the course overview.

Researchers in the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) share ideas and research findings in papers at biannual CSCL conferences, in a quarterly CSCL journal and in a CSCL book series. CSCL research labs are scattered around the world. Ironically given the focus of this field, there are few computer-based media to support collaborative learning about themes in CSCL at a distance. Students and researchers get together face-to-face in conferences, workshops and labs, but the technologies of the Internet and online social networking are rarely used effectively to promote the spread of discussion and the growth of the field.

I can imagine the challenge of designing a set of course experiences leading to the realization or adoption of the problem as stated. However, as interaction designers we may encounter clients who will have well developed problem statements. We may not be familiar with the problem domain and we may find what is given may not be the real problem. This gives opportunity—to learn and to apply the techniques and practices of identifying needs and establishing requirements; data gathering; data analysis, interpretation, and presentation; and the lifecycle models for the interaction design process.

I also think the proposal for the design project included in the course overview was well founded and a great plan.

Design new functionality for the use of the CSCL research community to supplement knowledge building, the sharing of ideas and the critical evaluation of theoretical positions. This can include features of a digital library for CSCL research; mechanisms to support social networking among students and others interested in discussing topics in CSCL of mutual interest; media for online interaction among students and researchers around the world; technologies for organizing or analyzing proposed positions; etc. This may include how CSCL students and researchers can define their own profiles, search for profiles of people they might want to interact with, invite people to join debates, to critique and rank published ideas, etc. In other words, design ways to help create and maintain a lively online CSCL research community in which people will want to interact, invite others, meet new people, and build shared knowledge throughout the year and around the world.

I am willing to be convinced that the projects we adopted were well informed by the problem statement and this proposal.

A clear guiding statement included in the course overview was:

A goal of the course is the creation of a wiki page on “A Vision of CSCL support for the CSCL research community.” The wiki page should be designed to appeal to members of the current CSCL community and to stimulate them to refine the page and to implement some of the ideas described on the page.

This goal would have been facilitated greatly in my view by addressing my first observation above and by discussing and understanding well positioned articles like (Cress & Kimmerle, 2008).

My comments so far may seem overly negative. I can imagine that affect; I apologize, it is not my intent. As I said before, I do have an abiding interest in CSCL and in good interaction design. My approach and interest is as a user and facilitator to other users. The textbook (Sharp, Rogers, & Preece, 2007) was useful, exemplary of good design, and is a great guide to go beyond the traditional human-computer interaction. I loved the readings and world of CSCL research they opened for me. To build on my interest I have subscribed to the ijCSCL.

The design project my team started was an idea offerd by Justin Patterson. Its focus was to develop support for hyperlinking reference terms embedded in chat sessions or any shared editing environment. I expressed a greater interest in and support for the process of collaboratively creating the implied reference library.

If we had 10 more weeks I would want to pursue the development of a collaborative editing environment to support the creation of a reference library. This would include a review of the capabilities and issues from existing or even abandoned projects focused on collaborative editing. This would include projects such as CURE, BSCW, and the Text Outline Project (Sanger, 2006) among others. I went into more detail in my own conceptual design paper. That paper and my thoughts here need further specification and development. I am comitted to doing that over the next 10 weeks of this summer. I would love to share that with anyone interested.

I have included her the references I found most helpful in shaping my thoughts in addition to the ones I refereced in my conceptual design paper.

Bibliography

Cress, U., & Kimmerle, J. (2008). A systemic and cognitive view on collaborative knowledge building with wikis. International Journal of Computer-Supporter Collaborative Learning, 3 (2), 105-122.

Kim, E. (2004, March 29). A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools. Retrieved May 5, 2008, from Blue Oxen Associates:

Lukosch, S. (2008). Seamless Transition between Connected and Disconnected Collaborative Interaction. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 13 (1), 59-87.

Sanger, L. (2006, April). Text and Collaboration: A personal manifesto for the Text Outline Project. Retrieved May 5, 2008, from The Text Outline Project:

Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1994). Computer support for knowledge-building communities. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3 (3), 265-283.

Schummer, T., & Lukosch, S. (n.d.). Computer-Mediated Interaction: A Pattern Language. Retrieved from

Sharp, H., Rogers, Y., & Preece, J. (2007). Chapter 11: Design, prototyping, and construction. In Interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction (2nd ed.). West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Stahl, G., Sumner, T., & Owen, R. (1995). Share globally, adapt locally: Software to create and distribute student-centered curriculum. Computers and Education. Special issue on education and the Internet, 24 (3), 237-246.

Stahl, G. (1998) The Research CyberStudio: Supporting Researchers as LifeLong Learners. Unpublished manuscript.

Stahl, G. (2006). Introduction: Essays on Technology, Interaction, and Cognition. In G. Stahl, Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge. (pp. 1-21). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Suthers, D. D. (2006). Technology affordances for intersubjective meaning making: A research agenda for CSCL. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 1 (3).

Stahl, G. (2008). Chat on Collaborative Knowledge Building. Qwerty. November 2008.