Knowledge-building Communities Research Articles

The role of the instructor and the tutor in the discoursive interaction in a blended university course: A case analysis

While a Knowledge Building community is a student-directed community, instructors play an important role, preparing the cultural, cognitive, and social conditions for the adoption of the Knowledge Building perspective. This study examines how a teaching team, including an instructor and a tutor, can facilitate knowledge building in a blended university course. More specifically, it aims to investigate the impact of the instructor’s and tutor’s interventions on student participation and the differences between them in terms of the quantity and quality of the interventions. The results show the impact of the teaching team interventions in the changes of the Specific Conversational Functions used by the students and highlight that instructor assumed the role of knowledge building activator, while the tutor is identified as a knowledge building facilitator. Practical and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

Building Community Knowledge In Online Competitions

Knowledge building is a prevalent feature in open online systems, but it is challenging to motivate participants to contribute and to maintain quality in the participants' contributions. Open online competitions, where participants compete for prizes with knowledge artifacts, offer a potential design model for online systems to incentivize community knowledge building activities. However, while there is evidence that participants contribute to public knowledge and share it during competitions, it remains unclear how and why they do so. In this study, through interviews with 14 participants in Kaggle Competitions, we investigate participants' motivation, practices, and challenges when contributing to community knowledge under a competitive structure. We find that competitive mechanisms impact expert and beginner participants very differently in their public knowledge building behaviors. Experts contribute to shared knowledge in order to compete for reputation, while they tend to form their own niches and only share knowledge artifacts that are abstract and not usable by less experienced participants. Beginners are often driven away from contributing to shared knowledge because of their vulnerable social image. We leverage Scardamalia's framework for Knowledge Building Communities to discuss the different challenges and opportunities that competitive design brings to expert and beginner participants. We offer design implications for effectively implementing competitive mechanisms that could benefit both expert and beginner participants in future knowledge building systems.

Text, Context, and Knowledge Building: Creating, Crisscrossing, and Rising above Jewish Identity

ABSTRACT Jewish education in Israel’s non-religious state (Mamlakhti) schools is intended to support an open-ended, pluralistic dialogue surrounding the question of Jewish identity. The distinct features of Knowledge Building Communities (KBCs) set them apart as a pedagogical approach that is particularly suitable for achieving this educational goal. In this article, we report on a year-long study that redesigned a tenth-grade Jewish philosophy class in Israel as a KBC. Our findings indicate that students co-created a Jewish-identity idea landscape, which they crisscrossed and rose above, to develop a deeply nuanced understanding of contemporary Jewish identity in Israel.

Remote teaching transition during COVID-19 – the first five weeks and the start of a digital knowledge-building community

The COVID-19 pandemic forces millions of teachers worldwide to engage in online teaching. Teachers are exploring and experimenting with various digital forms to deliver learning content, keep communicating with students and colleagues, and assess learning outcomes. A digital knowledge-building community gradually emerges and becomes more vivid. This note reports results from a study among honors teachers and administrators from 18 schools of a large Dutch university who all shared their problems and recommendations after the first five weeks of remote teaching, Spring 2020.

Design principles for transforming making programs into online settings at public libraries

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate design principles for transforming existing making communities of practice within public libraries into online knowledge-building communities to support youths, families with young children and adult members’ making and tinkering during COVID-19.Design/methodology/approachBuilding upon C4P and connected learning framework, the authors analyze existing literature and practitioner reports on informal learning projects related to making and STEM learning, family learning and online learning as well as emergent cases of innovative approaches in response to COVID-19 from public libraries, informal learning institutions and community groups.FindingsThe authors suggest 11 design principles around five areas: program design, facilitation, tools and materials, process documentation and sharing and feedback.Originality/valueThis work contributes to the information and learning sciences concerned with community engagement and knowledge creation by suggesting a design model to transform and sustain existing making communities of practice within public libraries into online knowledge-building communities during COVID-19.

Decentralized Learning Infrastructures for Community Knowledge Building

Learning in communities of practice (CoPs) makes up a significant portion of today's knowledge gain. However, only little technological support is tailored specifically toward CoPs and their particular strengths and challenges. Even worse, CoPs often do not possess the resources to host or develop a software ecosystem to support their activities. In this contribution, we describe a decentralized learning infrastructure for community knowledge building. It takes into account the constant change of these communities by providing a lightweight and scalable infrastructure, without the need for central coordination or facilitation. As a real use case, we implement a question-based dialog application for inquiry-based learning and ignorance modeling with our infrastructure. Additionally, we explore the possibility of using social bots to connect the services provided by the decentralized infrastructure to communication tools already present in most communities (e.g., chat platforms). Following a design science approach, we describe a multistep evaluation of both the infrastructure and application, together with the improvements made to the resulting artifacts of each step. Our results indicate the relevance of our approach, which may serve as an example of how decentralized learning infrastructures for learning outside of formal settings can be applied by CoPs for knowledge building.

Refining qualitative ethnographies using Epistemic Network Analysis: A study of socioemotional learning dimensions in a Humanistic Knowledge Building Community

Contemporary educational research has increasingly pointed to socioemotional dimensions of learning as important in promoting academic progress and sociocognitive developments. Epistemic Network Analysis, a methodology for producing quantitative ethnographies based on complex learning environments, has only begun to examine socioemotional facets of learning in classrooms. The aim of this research is to investigate what and how Epistemic Network Analysis can contribute to qualitative, socioemotionally-focused ethnographies of classroom learning communities. To do this, we employed Epistemic Network Analysis to analyze data collected during a semester of studies, in parallel to a stage developmental analysis of the same community using qualitative methods. The results of this study specifically show the importance of prior experience and how this interacts with participants' connectedness to the community, as well as how group dynamics are a vital aspect of community discourse and that the socioemotional dimensions that people attach to it may be the determinants of stage advancement. More generally, this study shows how Epistemic Network Analysis can be used to better understand complex socioemotional phenomena in learning communities by combining it with deep, qualitative ethnographies.

Fostering highly engaged knowledge building communities in socioemotional and sociocognitive hybrid learning spaces

AbstractWith the aim of understanding sociocognitive and socioemotional hybridity in learning spaces, we examined a semester‐long learning community where students were given the freedom to advance their epistemological and social agendas across face‐to‐face and online settings. We collected and analyzed 1,780 online notes written by students throughout the semester and coded them based on their sociocognitive or socioemotional values. We then examined the conversation chains that students engaged in vis‐a‐vis their developments as a group. In addition to showing how the group developmental stages served as a macro‐level context for the socioemotional and sociocognitive spaces, the analysis highlighted how deep, rapid, community knowledge building conversations spontaneously emerged in relation to the timing of socioemotional developments. This study elucidates an important dimension of hybrid spaces, emphasizing the need to design activities to support both sociocognitive and socioemotional spaces in technology‐enhanced learning communities.

Knowledge Building Analytics to Explore Crossing Disciplinary and Grade-Level Boundaries

Sustained creative work with ideas, work that leads beyond expectations, underpins knowledge creating organizations. Knowledge Building pedagogy, with its 12 principles and associated technology, Knowledge Forum, aims to provide necessary support for this goal. This exploratory study aims to assess the extent to which elementary-school students within Knowledge Building communities are able to exceed curriculum expectations. We defined “criss-crossing topics” as an indicator of exceeding expectations, and examined whether students are able to think and theorize in an interdisciplinary way and, in doing so, exceed curriculum expectations. We also examined how such criss-crossing topics may help advance the community knowledge. Results show that, when given agency, elementary students are able to extend knowledge boundaries, bringing greater range and explanatory coherence to their work, resulting in advancing community knowledge and idea improvement.

Building an online community of practice through WeChat for teacher professional learning

ABSTRACT This study explored how a group of higher education teachers in China used WeChat to build an online Community of Practice (OCoP), which supported their professional learning. A qualitative study was designed. Data were collected from multiple sources including online interaction excerpts, teachers’ reflections, classroom observation, and interviews. The results showed that the participants were utilizing the teacher group created through WeChat to build an OCoP for professional learning in terms of three dimensions: mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire. Positive perceptions were identified in these participants on joining the teacher group. Moreover, their teaching practices were transformed positively. A framework for using mobile social media to transform OCoPs into knowledge-building communities for teacher professional learning was proposed based on the findings. Guidelines for nurturing and maintaining OCoPs as well as for adopting the framework are developed. Suggestions for future research are provided.

Thoughts on the Launching of a New Journal: A Complex Dynamic Systems Perspective

The launching of The Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning is a signal achievement. I begin this commentary by speculating on why it is that the Psychology of Language Learning (PLL) has enjoyed such vigor of late. I expect that one reason is the coming together of a critical mass of researchers and strong leaders over their shared interests. A second reason may be that a new way of looking at familiar phenomena was introduced in the form of complex dynamic systems theory (CDST). Building on this supposition, I proceed to recommend extending CDST thinking in some new ways in PLL. These ways are phenomenological, relational, processual, and transdisciplinary. I conclude by urging the PLL community to remain connected with other areas of applied linguistics so that it may continue to contribute to a knowledge-building community.

Taking responsibility to support knowledge building: A constructive entanglement of spaces and ideas

AbstractThe digital age has fostered the rapid dissemination of Future Learning Spaces within the educational sector. Empirical studies examining learning processes relevant for the digital age within FLSs are needed, as scholarship has heretofore been overly reliant on anecdotal evidence or has struggled to keep up with innovative pedagogies. In an effort to advance this goal, we examined a knowledge building community that took place in a future learning space. Using responsibility‐taking as an underlying concept, our findings are twofold. First, we applied a grounded methodology to elucidate the way students take responsibility over the online space (The Knowledge Forum), a vital structure that supports collective knowledge building. This resulted in a spatial responsibility‐taking framework that includes 16 action‐tool combinations. The second finding resulted from applying this framework alongside a knowledge building analysis of a group of students. We present the results from our micro‐analysis, shedding light on different ways that spatial infrastructures and knowledge building can co‐mediate one another.Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic Collective cognitive responsibility is a vital component of knowledge building communities. A range of infrastructures play an important role throughout the evolving stages involved in knowledge building. Multi‐tiered approaches must be taken for future learning spaces to be used effectively. It is not the space itself, but the way that users take responsibility over the space that is a key determinant in the success of a future learning space. What this paper adds A novel framework for systematically capturing the way participants take responsibility over their online learning spaces. New insights into the ways that spaces and idea‐advancements co‐mediate one another throughout the inquiry process. Implications for practice and/or policy Teachers can use a toolkit to observe and identify desired practices related to responsibility taking in online spaces. Teachers can better discern when and how to intervene based on the way students use online spaces as they learn.

International Graduate Students: Agency, Intentionality, and Socialization Reciprocity

Using grounded theory methodology, this study explored the development and implementation of Cultures and Languages across the Curriculum initiative in a residential college at Michigan State University. With a focus on international graduate students, our investigation led us to knowledge building communities and to patterns of behavior that we have conceptualized as socialization reciprocity. We note two key characteristics of the knowledge-building communities created within the Cultures and Languages across the Curriculum program are agency and intentionality, and these can only be realized by starting from the premise that the contributions of all participants are essential to the community. We argue this is in contrast to the not uncommon assumption that the cultural, linguistic, and pedagogical knowledge of international graduate students is somehow deficient.

Automated dialog analysis to predict blogger community response to newcomer inquiries

Informal learning in online knowledge building communities (OKBCs) often starts with online academic help seeking, and with visitor inquiries on specific topics. In such a context, learning presupposes adequate OKBC response. Employing a social learning analytics approach based on natural language processing and Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, this study aims to predict blogger OKBC response. Manipulating the blog topic (well-defined vs. ill-defined) and the visitor inquiry format (off-topic vs. on-topic), a field experiment with a 2 × 2 factorial design was conducted on a sample of N = 68 blogger communities with a total of 25,303 members. For the entire sample, the community response was influenced only by the inquiry format. In a separate examination of the experimental groups, however, this remained true only for the well-defined topic, whereas for the ill-defined topic the community response only depended on the previously established dialog quality. The findings suggest identification criteria for responsive communities, which can support newcomer integration in OKBCs and, from a larger perspective, the use of OKBCs as components of formal learning environments.

Conversational functions for knowledge building communities: a coding scheme for online interactions

The aim of this study was to develop a coding scheme rooted in the Knowledge Building model, named Conversational Functions for Knowledge Building (CF4KB), to analyze students’ interactions in an online undergraduate course. In order to develop the coding scheme, we analyzed students discourse and identified the kinds of “Conversational Functions” students performed. Connecting these identified functions with Knowledge Building Model principles, we developed the coding scheme to analyze knowledge building [In the present article, we used “Knowledge Building” to indicate the theoretical model and “knowledge building” to refer to the activity of the community members.] activity. Applying the resulting coding scheme, two independent judges coded 186 messages posted into Knowledge Forum by 26 students (5 men and 21 women) attending the online course of Educational Psychology at University of Valle d’Aosta to develop the coding scheme. The inter-coder agreements obtained were 77.3 and 78.0%, with Cohen’s K = 0.68 and 0.66, respectively for Specific and Global Conversational Functions level. The theoretical implications and possible uses in different contexts for future inquiry of this instrument are discussed.

Forming shared inquiry structures to support knowledge building in a grade 5 community

This study explores the reflective processes by which a grade 5 science community co-constructed shared inquiry structures to focus and guide its inquiry about human body systems over a school year supported by a collaborative online environment. The co-constructed structures included a list of collective wondering areas as the shared focus of inquiry and models of the inquiry process in the form of “research cycle.” Qualitative analyses of field notes, classroom videos, student notebooks and interviews elaborate the evolution of the inquiry areas and the “research cycle” model as well as students’ adaptive use of the structures to guide deeper inquiry. Content analyses of students’ individual research questions and collaborative online discourse indicate that students used the structures to develop more advanced inquiry and make productive contributions. The results contribute to elaborating a reflective structuration approach to co-organizing and sustaining long-term, open-ended inquiry in knowledge building communities.

Co-development patterns of knowledge, experience, and self in humanistic knowledge building communities

This study attends the learning sciences to the work of Carl Rogers and his person-centered therapy and education. Building on claims that knowledge building communities are idea-centered, as well as recent research in this area that has looked at learning holistically, we examine the notion of a ‘humanistic knowledge building community’ as an integration of idea-centered classroom knowledge building communities with Rogerian person-centeredness. We investigated an innovative course for graduate students in an educational technologies program that both inspired and informed this conceptualization. Our grounded theoretical approach combined with a microanalysis of one student revealed five patterns that knowledge, experience, and self can co-develop in a humanistic knowledge building community.

Mobile devices in instruction, the options of iPad in pedagogical innovation

The presentation outlines Apple’s educational policy, focusing on the following aspects of innovation: - Development of 21st century skills; - Curriculum development based on the integration of a wide range of mobile infrastructure; - Informative assessment that supports continuous development of skills and abilities through ICT-supported methodologies; - Social and emotional connection within digital culture; - Creativity and innovation as integral aspects of educational development; - 24/7 access to educational resources; The presentation will illustrate the educational model realised with the help of Apple technol-ogy, Challenge Based Learning (CBL) through an overview of results of the Apple Class-rooms of Tomorrow - Today, ACOT), an innovation project launched in 2008 and realised in hundreds of secondary schools worldwide. This model uses a learning environment based on mobile computing, just-in-time learning, self-authored textbooks by teachers produced through the iBooks Author software and projects by students planned and executed with the help of educational software applications designed for iPads. The presentation will show CBL adapted for the iPad experiment in Eger: - creation of an ACOT environment complete with 1:1 accessibility to iPads by teachers and students, collaborative tools and 7/24 accessibility to learning content; - tasks selected to foster strategic thinking; - social issues integrated in the curriculum through local and global case studies; - interdisciplinary approach to arts and science subjects; - development of 21st Century skills; - extensive use of Web 2.0 technologies for teaching and learning; - continuous documentation of the teaching and learning process through developing dis-cipline-based and interdisciplinary knowledge building communities.

Developing secondary students’ epistemic agency in a knowledge-building community

A key educational objective for the twenty-first century is developing students’ epistemic agency. Epistemic agency is the active process of choosing when, what, where one learns and how one knows, as well as the capacity to create knowledge in a community. The knowledge-building communities model developed by Scardamalia and Bereiter was used in a New Zealand Year 13 distance art history class to support the development of students’ epistemic agency in 2013. In this study, students were given more control in the learning process, and were able to exercise epistemic agency through identifying their knowledge gaps, sharing information and ideas, developing ideas and creating communal knowledge. A number of factors that increased students’ development of epistemic agency are also discussed in this article.

Communities of Practice, Learning Communities, and Knowledge Building Communities : Are There Differences?

Communities of Practice, Learning Communities, and Knowledge Building Communities : Are There Differences?