Collaborative Representations

Dan Suthers, Principal Investigator

The Collaborative Representations project is exploring ways to design interactive software in which learners can easily collaborate online while learning with rich representations. The project is also studying how the representations themselves may be designed to guide learners into knowledge-building discourse. Software for online learning is being developed in collaboration with teachers and scientists to help ensure suitability for instructional objectives. Controlled experiments are being undertaken to refine the software design and to assess the effects of the representations on discourse processes and on learning outcomes. Instructional and assessment strategies are being developed in the context of authentic research projects involving students, teachers and scientists, and will be disseminated to teachers through professional development activities. Continued work in this area will contribute to a scientifically tested theory of representationally rich collaborative learning, and inform the design of the next generation of software and associated instructional and assessment strategies for online learning.

Motivations

The present widespread interest in the use of computers for online learning at all levels from primary school to university and adult education presents an unprecedented opportunity for leveraging the computational medium's strengths for learning. Along with this opportunity comes profound responsibility to adopt these technologies in ways specifically proven to support learning. Research on learning shows that social processes such as collaboration and mentoring play an important role. Likewise, many disciplines make use of rich forms of visual representations, and research has shown that proper use of visual representations can impact on learning. Yet, existing software for online learning provides only primitive support for manipulation of representations other than text, and there is a lack of research on how representational tools and online discussion tools may be constructively combined.

Problems Addressed

The limited comparative research available suggests that the form of representations used by learners during collaborative inquiry can have a significant effect on the discourse of the collaborating learners. In brief, different forms of representations lead to different features of discourse. This effect has been shown for both representations that are constructed by learners during collaboration (Suthers, 1999) and representations used as a medium of discourse (Baker & Lund, 1997; Guzdial, 1997; Wojahn, et al., 1998). Yet such studies sometimes fail to show an effect on learning outcomes (as opposed to processes). Although time on task is a factor, learners may also need more explicit support for their knowledge-building in order for process differences to be translated into outcome differences.

A separate but related line of research on computer mediated communication (CMC) has identified several problems related to typical discourse representations through which people communicate online. These problems include incoherence due to the violation of discourse conventions for topic maintenance (Herring, 1999), and lack of convergence, due to the intrinsically divergent representations used in threaded discussion (Hewitt, 1997). The shared agreement or knowledge being constructed by the discourse is not made explicit by existing tools, and hence it is difficult to find relevant contributions, place one's own contribution in the relevant context, or quickly grasp and assess the outcome of the discourse (Turoff et al., 1999). We need better online support for artifact-centered discourse, discourse that makes reference to and is tightly integrated with visual or textual artifacts.

The fundamental problems are a lack of integration of discourse representations with other representations, and a lack of explicit construction of the desired outcome of the collaboration, leading to weak support for online knowledge-building discourse.

Collaborative Representations: Two Perspectives

We can approach the problem of designing representational environments for learning from two perspectives:

From representations to learning interactions: Any given representational system has its own affordances, restricting what can be represented and making certain information more salient than others. How can these representational affordances be leveraged to guide the content and dynamics of collaborative learning interactions?
From learning interactions to representations: How can we construct active representational media in which learners find it natural to record their discourse, problem solving activities, and emerging knowledge to support learning by reflection, mentoring, and assessment?

On the Representational Guidance project, we focused on the first perspective above, investigating the effects of alternate representations for critical inquiry in science on verbal discourse during proximal (co-present) collaboration between learners. We are now extending this research to asynchronous (anytime, anyplace) collaboration, where the use of representational tools for the discourse itself, and hence the second perspective above, becomes more critical. We will go further, combining the two perspectives to provide explicit representational support for knowledge-building discourse in science education.

Proposed Solutions

The Collaborative Representations project will design an approach to CMC that supports artifact-centered discourse by linking the discourse representation with the artifacts under discussion. We will then provide a tool enabling participants to construct an explicit representation of the topics and conclusions of the discourse itself as they engage in the discourse. In learning applications, this evolving knowledge representation will itself become the artifact under discussion in the CMC environment. Each contribution to the discourse will be referenced to a component of the knowledge representation, improving coherence because comments are localized where they belong, and improving convergence because multiple contributions referencing a given topic are collected together. The knowledge representation will also serve as a summary of the status of the collaboration, available to learners and mentors to support reflection and assessment.

Research Plan

This work will be conducted in the context of an initiative in K-12 science, math, engineering and technology (SMET) education known as Hawai‘i Networked Learning Communities (HNLC). This initiative is thematically focused on "global environmental studies, situated locally." It will utilize networked collaboration software, remote sensing, and electronic mentoring to address the Hawai‘i Content and Performance Standards by engaging students and teachers with scientists in authentic research and conservation work.

The work will include the following activities:

Representational systems will be developed in collaboration with HNLC teachers and scientists to help ensure suitability for instructional objectives.
Controlled experiments will be undertaken to refine the software design and to assess effects of the design on discourse and on learning outcomes.
The software will be used to support long term collaborative projects between students, teachers and scientists engaged in asynchronous collaboration on SMET projects. This will enable study of appropriation and use of the tool, inform a process of iterative refinement, and likely suggest new research issues.
Working with teachers and colleagues, we will study the possible use of knowledge representations as a means of assessment for collaborative projects undertaken by groups over the Internet, which is more difficult to assess than traditional individual classroom work.
These technologies and strategies will also be utilized in our Asynchronous Learning Network undergraduate and graduate degree programs in computer science.

The proposal funding this research may be found here. Please revisit this site regularly for updates on the research.

Related Publications

Baker, M. & Lund, K. (1997).: Promoting reflective interactions in a CSCL environment. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 13, 175-193.
Guzdial, M. (1997, December).: Information ecology of collaborations in educational settings: Influence of tool. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL '97), (pp. 83-90). Toronto: University of Toronto.
Herring, S.C. (1999, January).: Interactive coherence in CMC. In Proceedings of the 32nd Hawai‘i International Conference on the System Sciences (HICSS 32). (CD-ROM). Maui, Hawai‘i: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE).
Hewitt, J. (1997).: Beyond threaded discourse. Paper presented at WebNet'97.
Suthers, D. D. (1999e, December).: Effects of alternate representations of evidential relations on collaborative learning discourse. In Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL '99). Stanford University.
Turoff, M., Hiltz, S. R., Bieber, M., Fjermestad, J., & Rana, A. (1999).: Collaborative discourse structures in computer mediated group communications. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 4(4).
Wojahn, P.G., Neuwirth, C.M., & Bullock, B. (1998, April).: Effects of interfaces for annotation on communication in a collaborative task. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '98), (pp. 456-463). Los Angeles: ACM Press.