Designing networked learning environments to support ... - CiteSeerX

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Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2005

Designing networked learning environments to support intercultural communication and collaboration in science learning Marcelo Milrad* and Marianne Björn Center for Learning and Knowledge Technologies (CeLeKT), School of Mathematics and Systems Engineering, Växjö University, SE- 35195, Växjö, Sweden Fax: +46-73-3969574 E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author

Michele H. Jackson Department of Communication, University of Colorado, 270 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0270, USA Fax: +1-303-492-8139 E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: In this paper we describe our efforts to foster intercultural communication and collaboration in educational scenarios using advanced learning technologies to support hands on experimentation and science learning. A special focus is given to the idea that innovative uses of these technologies will enhance the scientific experience of learners if intercultural exchange is involved in this process. Specific contributions include the creation of a number of applications to support collaboration between different learning communities, thus to provide ‘cultural glue’ between different learning activities. These efforts are conducted within the framework of our European Union funded COLDEX project (Collaborative Learning and Distributed Experimentation, see http://www.coldex.info). Keywords: science communication; science education; intercultural communication; collaboration; learning communities; distributed learning; knowledge networks. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Milrad, M., Björn, M. and Jackson, M.H. (2005) ‘Designing networked learning environments to support intercultural communication and collaboration in science learning’, Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp.308–319. Biographical notes: Marcelo Milrad is a senior researcher at the school of Mathematics and Systems Engineering, at Växjö University (VXU) in Sweden. He is also the Co-director of the Center for Learning and Knowledge Technologies (CeLeKT) at the same institution. His current research interests include the design of learning environments to support learning about complex domains, collaborative discovery learning and the development of mobile and wireless applications to support collaborative learning. He has published a respectable number of scientific papers and he has been presenting and giving lectures about his work in more than 15 countries. During the last years Marcelo Milrad has served as a programme committee member in a number of Copyright © 2005 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Designing networked learning environments to support intercultural

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international scientific conferences. Prior to entering VXU, he has been working at the Research Corporation for Media and Communication Technologies, the Institute for Media Technology (IMT), the Center for Human-Computer Studies (CMD) at Uppsala University and at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Marianne Björn conducts her research at Växjö University in both CeLeKT and the School of Education. Her research interests concern the evaluation of educational activities in interactive learning environments. Furthermore, she is currently working in a couple of projects with regard to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) as a tool to support learning and teaching. In the European Union funded project, Focus Alfa, Marianne is exploring the use of ICT as compensatory tools for people with reading and writing difficulties and the impact these tools may have to support the learning and teaching processes. Michele H. Jackson is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO. She conducts research in the areas of collaboration and communication, and technological support for collaboration and for learning. Since 2000, she has been working in interdisciplinary teams to develop learning strategies for improving skills of collaboration and communication among teams of computer scientists and engineers and among teams designing educational technologies. Her work has been published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Theory, and the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. http://comm.colorado.edu/mjackson

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Introduction

Over the past two decades, there has been a significant increase in our understanding of the developmental, cognitive and social dimensions of learning. Current research in the learning sciences indicates that in addition to most knowledge being an interpretation of personal experiences it is also social in nature: knowledge is jointly constructed in interaction. Recent social constructivist perspectives (Jonassen and Land, 2000) regard learning as enculturation, the process by which learners become collaborative meaning-makers among a group defined by common practices, language, use of tools, values, beliefs, and so on. Social constructivism asserts that a particularly effective way for knowledge-building communities to form and grow is through collaborative activities that involve, not just the exchange of information, but also the design and construction of meaningful artefacts. Groups influence what and how individuals learn and how they build knowledge collaboratively. Communication processes are central for supporting these social constructivist models of learning. An increasing amount of research has been documenting how social constructivist models may be used to re-conceptualise curricula, teaching practices and learning activities, and to effect significant and rich types of learning gains. Many new constructivist approaches to learning utilise new computational and communication technologies as part of learning environments in which students engage in challenging problem- and project-centred learning activities (Jonassen, Peck and Wilson, 1999).

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M. Milrad, M. Björn and M.H. Jackson

From a social constructivist perspective, collaboration with others is a central element for learning. Internet-based learning environments provide means for distributed collaboration and thus they contribute to the creation of global learning communities. They provide the opportunity to extend membership in these communities across a distance. When this distance extends across cultures, the learning situations may be distinctively richer than those limited to a single culture, because these cultural resources are entered naturally into the learning activity itself. However, a resulting concern is the practical question of communicating across cultures. A particular issue is that different cultures may have varying attitudes towards collaboration (Hofstede, 2001), and negotiating these differences may be difficult in distributed, technologically mediated contexts. This challenge of communicating across cultures heightens the observation that most technologies available for virtual learning environments are low in social context cues (Sproull and Kiesler, 1986; Swan, 2003; Walther, 1992). While these cues may increase over time through the accumulation of interaction and development of interpersonal relationships (Walther, 1996), learning activities are typically of short duration and involve a number of different individuals. Thus, there is little opportunity for context cues to develop. One unintended consequence is feelings of social and cultural isolation and misunderstanding. While most of the efforts for the creation of virtual learning environments are focused on technical aspects, other important challenges related to online teaching and learning, are many times ignored. Too often virtual learning environments are developed and implemented following mainly technical design patterns developed by a local design group, and little thought is given to integrating the technology with pedagogical objectives and strategies that are taking into account multicultural aspects. The assumptions about communication that may be embedded within a technology may also be unexamined, such as a preference for free-flowing versus more structured conversation. In this paper, we will describe our ongoing efforts with regard to the design of networked learning environments that support intercultural communication in the particular domain of science learning. Our research is conducted in the context of the European Union (EU) funded project ‘Collaborative Learning and Distributed Experimentation’ (COLDEX). The COLDEX project aims at developing and using new information and communication technologies (ICT) approaches and computational tools to foster scientific experimentation, modelling and simulation in distributed and collaborative settings in an inter-cultural (European-Latin American) community of learners. COLDEX is a collaborative effort between different universities, schools and science centres in Sweden, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Chile. The languages we are using in the different COLDEX project activities are English, Spanish, and to some extent, Portuguese.

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COLDEX: designing for pedagogical change and innovation

The COLDEX project aims at designing innovative learning environments in order to support a wide range of global open learning activities within the scientific domains of astronomy, biodiversity, chemistry and seismology. This goal is achieved by combining innovative pedagogical approaches (e.g. challenge-based learning (CBL) together with


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the support of a variety of modelling tools and experimental scenarios (Milrad et al., 2003). The CBL approach advocated by COLDEX can be described as extended problem-based learning, but it is also inspired by social constructivism. These views stress curiosity and interest in real-world phenomena as motivational principles. Project-based and problem-based activities are usually focused on a driving question or problem (Jonassen, Peck and Wilson, 1999). In CBL the question or the problem is replaced by a challenge. The challenge, in a CBL activity, is initiated either by the COLDEX project, a teacher or a student group. The assignments or challenges to be solved might include ways to develop, design and implement solutions for problems related to scientific phenomena (Baloian et al., 2004b). This could include to access remote sites, e.g. an observatory with a high quality telescope or a seismic measurement station in Chile. The educational principles include the notion of authentic activities, which in the context of COLDEX are defined as tasks that provide experiences that help students to conceptualise the phenomena under investigation, rather than providing only abstract information. Another important feature of these authentic activities is to provide real-world, case-based contexts, rather than pre-determined instructional sequences. We argue that learning activities must be anchored in real uses, or it is likely that the result will be knowledge that remains inert. This will especially be made clear when a learning activity is evaluated and the students assessed on how well they transfer the learning to other contexts and tasks (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 1999). COLDEX aims at ‘construction of realities’, which includes the setting of real experiments, the provision of virtual scenarios and artefacts that support other types of perceptual experience. Abstract and conceptual modelling using formal as well as informal sketches is supported through a combination of visual concept mapping tools with more formal representations such as ‘system dynamics’. Concrete modelling and design includes 3D models as well as physical models with IT components. A speciality of COLDEX lies in its origination from a European-Latin American cooperation incentive. COLDEX is in this sense trans-continental and aims at cross-fertilisation of experience and scientific understanding in a multicultural and multi-experiential community. Local learning communities will exchange their ideas and work in an ‘Open User Scheme’ (OUS). The local learning communities share a rich everyday context. Interactive tools to create and augment collaboration enable the plain re-use of objects by an integrated learning object repository (LOR) that represents the ‘group memory’ of the community. This repository supports a contextual search adapted to the necessities of each community. The different tools and learning objects can be accessed through specific digital experimental toolkits and through the COLDEX online portal. The latest is a semantic portal that provides integrated access to a variety of experimental scenarios, resources and collaboration facilities for learning communities and also gives access to the LOR (Verdejo et al., 2003). The portal consists of a persistence mechanism that stores objects enriched with a contextual description. The latter enables the knowledge re-utilisation in many learning activities and scenarios constituting, as such, a collective memory of the COLDEX community. One of the main factors responsible for contributing to the difficulties with building collaborative educational scenarios around computer-mediated communication (CMC) is

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the lack of shared context. CMC can hardly capture the full variety of non-verbal signals and situational references. One level of context is personal knowledge of other members; the effectiveness of distributed work group is greatly enhanced, for example, when members can first meet face-to-face (Lipnick and Stamps, 1997; Brazelton and Gorry, 2003). A second level is a shared or a structurally and culturally similar external environment (e.g., a campus, or shared routines. But this is not even the biggest problem: context stems from shared history, from shared external environments (e.g., on a campus), and from shared daily routines (Nardi, 1996). On a much deeper level, from a social construction of science perspective, the understanding of the problem, or the phenomena to be studied depend fundamentally on the cultural elements of the context (Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Harding, 1991). While the robust nature of human interaction might compensate for the first and second levels, the third remains a significant problem. All these aspects are important in collaborative learning but hard to transmit through computer networks between humans who do not have regular face-to-face contact. This means, ICT tools usually serve for an individual use or at most for a relatively small (culturally homogeneous) group. Tools for distributed collaboration across cultures, therefore, should involve specific concerns for the interaction. Allmendiger et al. (2003) argue that collaborative virtual environments need social context cues to overcome depersonalisation, social inhibitions or normative constraints and to establish mutual understanding and regulate turn-taking. They have found that nonverbal signs have led to greater motivation and to smoother communication with fewer misunderstandings. Many learning platforms offer textual communication tools. It is even more appropriate to use richer media when group members with multiple perspectives or from multiple cultures are performing a complex task (Cheng, Franham and Stone, 2002). So, when we say that the creation of global learning communities is a central issue for COLDEX, we have to consider the global aspect of a phenomenon, the context problem and the need for social cues. There are three consequences: •

build communities bottom-up, starting with local, usually face-to-face, communities such as school classes or study groups and let these establish contacts with other communities

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take subjective experiences seriously (and not only scientific understanding)

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include social context cues in the collaboration environment.

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Designing for the formation of learning communities

In the COLDEX project, the formation of learning communities is stressed. A community can be defined as a social organisation of people who share goals, values and knowledge (Jonassen, Peck and Wilson, 1999). According to this definition, students in a classroom are a community only when they share common interests and work together towards a common goal. To be effective, learning in groups and also in virtual communities should take place in a common context of habits, orientations, persons, locations, etc. which serve as a frame of reference and allow for more implicit communication and shared understanding. Virtual learning communities have to be established by building up a common context


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and a common culture, first locally and then extended across locations. The collaboration and interaction that arise from the local groups within COLDEX, using both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration techniques, are the basis for establishing contact with other communities in other countries. It is important to remember that a technology-enhanced framework alone will not create collaboration and community building. In contrast, it has been demonstrated that non-technical factors influence if people will use the technology and if they will collaborate (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 1999; Brazelton and Gorry, 2003). According to Bransford, Brown and Cocking (1999), three main factors should be considered while trying to design successful network-based communities. These three factors are: •

an emphasis on group rather than on one-to-one communication

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clear goals or tasks

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explicit efforts to facilitate group interaction and create new social norms.

Salomon (1993) argues that interdependence between the learners is essential for the success of collaborative learning. Interdependence effects the division of labour, roles; the necessity to share; and the need for joint thinking. In a recent research project Brazelton and Gorry (2003) found out that face-to-face contact plays an important role in the beginning of the development of an electronic community. When community members have developed a personal relationship, it can then be enough to communicate only through the technology. This is of course not possible for the global learning community within the OUS of COLDEX. The COLDEX project is building communities bottom-up, starting with local, usually face-to-face, communities such as school classes or study groups and let these establish contacts with other communities through a network. The synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and networked interaction that arise from these basic groups will form the global community. The students will discuss and share their results and subjective experience and thereby fostering collaborative knowledge building. The COLDEX network provides tool for communication and collaboration. These tools are flexible and they are designed to adapt to different learning contexts and cultures. Synchronous collaboration tools contribute to forming a ‘group memory’ within the LOR, which can also be available in asynchronous mode. Conversely, the use of archives and repositories is designed to be tightly integrated with synchronous activities. A consideration here is how to store synchronous activities in a way that they can be searched and easy to retrieve (Brazelton and Gorry, 2003), especially when considering that the material will be produced in at least two different languages. The COLDEX learning environment provides support for communication of subjective and culturally/geographically dependent views of natural and experimental phenomena. The students are given a chance to take a global perspective of the phenomena of interest. Thus, access to these common data, is also a source of learning from each other, in a multicultural community and it will hopefully foster inter-cultural understanding. Within the framework of COLDEX, we have to make provision of adequate tools for supporting and communicating these rich experiences as well as for maintaining archives and ‘memories’ that are accessible through these multicultural communities.

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Technology as a social mediator

The design of technological and pedagogical support for collaboration and communication in networked learning environments is a difficult process, not only because the learners are separated by distance, but because they are also separated by culture. Establishing common ground and mutual understanding—two important ingredients for collaborative work and learning (Baker et al., 1999; Cornelius and Boos, 2003) become a challenge. Schwarz (1999) points out that collaborative learning often occurs when people cannot take for granted the common ground of similar thoughts, roles and goals. When they cannot rely on a common ground they need to make the effort to negotiate understanding. The process or negotiation of building a common ground involves (Baker et al., 1999) communicative factors: to mention facts and proposals in the presence of other people; monitoring the state of the others; and feedback (with acknowledgement or an attempt to repair a deviation). This communication is primarily based on written or spoken language. There may also be non-verbal signals and symbols. These symbols can lead to smoother communication, and thus facilitating new processes for supporting collaborative understanding (Allmendiger et al., 2003). One research interest of this project is the way that COLDEX technologies and the content of the LOR develop over time, as users in different locations complete similar projects, and interact with each other. We base this on the principle that technologies do not follow an intrinsic trajectory of development and use (Smith and Marx, 1994). Rather, technologies and their uses are the result of a complex and ongoing interplay of social and material elements. Paying attention to this process means seeing development as something that continuously occurs over a technology’s lifespan as it is constituted and reconstituted in social interaction. The COLDEX set of technologies, therefore, are not simply channels or static tools, but rather become what Star and her colleagues (Star and Ruhleder, 1996; Star and Bowker, 2002) call infrastructure, or the emergent structures that form the interrelationship of people and tools and that, if such interaction is successful, become standardised over time as norms and routines. One important element of these processes of ‘infrastructuring’ is the ways in which COLDEX technologies may serve to mediate or bridge the spaces between cultures; that is how they may operate as boundary objects (Star and Ruhleder, 1996). From this perspective, we are less interested in the transmission of messages, and more interested in whether the COLDEX portal can function as meeting place for learners who otherwise would find it difficult to form a common ground. Understanding technological development as a social as well as a technical issue is critical for making sense of learning innovation. As we build technologies intending to enable learning through directing communication and practices, we need to recognise the interrelationship between how learners interact with the technology and the way they then perceive their interaction with each other.


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Learning activities and collaboration in a COLDEX scenario

A meaningful learning activity consistent with CBL is to present learners with a challenge scenario and to ask them to think about a number of possible solutions using a variety of interactive tools. Such an activity serves to centre thinking around meaningful problems and is typically effective in facilitating small group collaboration. These local groups or communities will then share and collaborate on a global level. In this section we will illustrate some of these ideas by presenting a case we have developed and implemented within the field of seismology. Scenarios in COLDEX are defined as follows: ‘A collection of educational activities which are inspired by the ideas behind CBL. The COLDEX project aims at facilitating learning scenarios of various types, which include different sizes and types of learning groups. These activities are designed for well-specified domains and are supported by an educational workflow and a number of tool kits’. We are using the following scale for levels of collaboration (Milrad et al., 2003): •

Level of individual learning: Here, tools should support rich representations with high interactivity between the learner and the application, particularly also responsive environments that stimulate the learner’s activity. It is important that tools are inter-operable between learning phases to facilitate the transfer and reuse of results. Individual learners should have full access to group and community archives on all levels.

•

Small group level: Small groups may be formed during classroom activities, but also in between, e.g. as ad hoc working groups to solve exercises. Small groups may use synchronous and asynchronous means of collaboration support. Again, reusability, interoperability and access to group resources are important.

•

Large group level: Examples of large groups are classrooms or courses. Individual exercises in the classroom would be level 1, whereas a plenary discussion or presentation would be level 3.

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Global community level: The COLDEX learning community is trans-continental and initiated by the open user scheme. It is technically supported by a community archive, which serves as a collective memory and provides primarily asynchronous collaboration mechanisms.

Within the field of remote experimentation, the domain of distributed seismography can meet these pedagogical requirements and provide value to students and society. The real-world problem starts with the natural phenomenon of earthquakes, which are experienced by most students in the Chilean context. Results from seismographic research are used to analyse seismic processes, to evaluate and avoid risks for specific regions and locations and somehow to understand the uncontrollable behaviour of nature. Born out of these needs are not only professional tools for remote measurement and analysis and professional practices but also the need for applying and developing mathematical and physical operations. Collaborative efforts are needed to integrate temporal-spatial measures into shared computations and the creation of seismic maps (Baloian et al., 2004a; 2004b).

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Besides, persisting complexities and fuzziness in the nature and instruments of measurement as well as dispute on theoretical approaches afford participants to specify and argue about their sometimes-conflicting research decisions and conclusions. Affordance of the field yields to potential learning goals of students moving from peripheral participation to the epicentre of the activity as follows: •

learn about by engaging in seismographic research contents, methods and tools

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develop and apply basic concepts and methods of mathematics and physics

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discover the potentials of collaboration

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reflect upon the impact of scientific research and the limits of human nature.

To support these learning goals and provide a computation-augmented environment for collaborative learning about real-world problems, tasks and solutions the following paradigms and design principles are applied, as recently suggested by Baloian et al. (2004a; 2004b): •

Collaboration inside small group: The group trying to compute the distance to the hypocentre, based on local data. The tool supports an asynchronous, cumulative model of collaboration by annotating and recording the work of each participant. Creating coupled sessions supports synchronous distributed collaboration.

•

Collaboration in large group in the same earthquake region: Exchanging data produced by the seismograph is the first step towards collaboration. Calculation of the distance from a seismograph to the hypocentre is based on visually determining the time difference between the arrivals of both waves. Since the results of the different groups will not be exactly the same, the system gives the necessary platform for the groups to engage in a discussion, trying to find the most probable area where the hypocentre was located, contrasting all the results.

•

Collaboration among groups in different regions within the global community: Because the system is working over the internet, it gives student groups located in remote areas the possibility of using the same data, ask about the consequences of the earthquake and try to ‘reproduce’ it in the virtual laboratory or even apply it in the earthquake model kit.

The application of these principles in combination with a number of technological tools developed within the COLDEX project has resulted in the design of an intercultural learning environment for learning about seismology (see Figure 1). It should be noted that this learning scenario and all its components are the result of a common effort between team members of the project coming from Chile, Germany and Sweden. (Baloian et al., 2004b)

Designing networked learning environments to support intercultural Figure 1

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The different components of the distributed seismology scenario

Conclusions and future directions

Whereas science and engineering are typically seen as ‘neutral’ to different cultural and geographic backgrounds (which might also be questioned), this is certainly not the case for the ‘experiential’ level. In this paper we discussed those aspects that are the foundations of our work in order to foster intercultural communication in educational scenarios using advanced learning technologies to support hands on experimentation and science learning. Beyond the science and engineering methodologies, we want to stress the aspect of formation of learning communities on different levels. The COLDEX approach to learning, collaboration and communication emphasises the creation of shared interaction, social structures and cultural embeddings for meaningful learning. It is evident that, for instance, Swedish high school students would benefit from communicating with their South American counterparts to understand the concrete meaning of seismic phenomena in everyday situations better. The core ideas presented in this paper are being used as guidelines for the design and the implementation of a number of educational scenarios in our project. Our initial trials with science centre workshops and classrooms both, in Europe and Latin America, have been quite successful and our preliminary results are promising. Particularly, we can enrich the experiences of learners from different cultures by bringing them closer to the activities of real scientists through innovative combinations of technologies.

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Our future efforts will continue to refine both the technology and activity frameworks for providing learners with more meaningful intercultural experiences. One of the coming challenges for COLDEX is to develop flexible communication mechanisms that allow students not only to find material and tools but also to facilitate collaboration across cultures. Relevant questions that we will be exploring are: How are multicultural aspects and different interpretations of scientific phenomena mediated by technology? Which social goals and objectives embed themselves within the technology and thus became invisible or taken-for-granted?

Acknowledgements This work has been partially supported by the European Community under the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme of the 5th Framework Programme for RTD – Project COLDEX, contract IST-2001-32327. This document does not represent the opinion of the European Community, and the European Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of the data appearing therein.

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