Abstract
People can learn a lot through (collaborative) reflection at work: In organizations, staff debate experiences and due to issues every day, thus reflecting together and learning from each other. While this is desirable, it is often hindered by differences in time and space. Online discussions in community-like systems may provide a means to overcome this issue and enable staff to share experiences and learn from them. In this paper, we study two different data sets from two software systems to support online collaborative reflection in order to analyze what possible factors influence the occurrence of aspects of reflection in online discussions, like experiences, suggestions and learning. Our results include findings that partially approve existing models of (collaborative) reflection, but also others that add to or even challenge these models. Overall, we found that collaborative reflection may take different paths towards learning. From this we derive that facilitation mechanisms need to take up these paths, and that facilitation may be successful in different ways than anticipated from existing literature. We describe possible facilitation mechanisms and discuss their implementation.
Highlights
Reflection is a process of learning from experience by going back to past activities, re-assessing them in the light of current knowledge and drawing conclusions for further activities (Boud et al 1985)
While the frequency analysis did not show a clear singular flow of collaborative reflection, we found that there was an inner differentiation of threads: For example, we found ‘experience-heavy’ threads, which contained a higher amount of posts including experiences than others, and ‘knowledge-heavy’ threads that included more posts based on knowledge (KNO)
We found that collaborative reflection unfolds along multiple paths, which are likely to be influenced by the context reflection is conducted in
Summary
Reflection is a process of learning from experience by going back to past activities, re-assessing them in the light of current knowledge and drawing conclusions for further activities (Boud et al 1985). It has been emphasized that reflection often takes place in social settings, in which people explicitly exchange their experiences and learn from them together (Cressey et al 2006; Prilla et al 2013; Scott 2010). This social or collaborative (Prilla et al 2013) reflection has a lot of potential, as it may lead to solutions for problems that often go beyond solutions found by individuals (Hoyrup 2004; Mercer and Wegerif 1999). The discourse about collaborative reflection links to central concepts of the CSCW community such as sensemaking, common ground, group decision support and collaborative problem solving (cf. Prilla et al 2013, see below)
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