Minna Lakkala and Hanni Muukkonen
UH University of Helsinki, Finland
November 16, 2006

Course name: Psychology of modern learning environments

Institution: University of Helsinki

Course instructors: Muukkonen Hanni, Lakkala Minna, Lallimo Jiri and Hakkarainen Kai

Scope: The scenario describes a) past practices and experiences and c) fictious visions and examples

No. of participants: 13

Target population: Undergraduate students from various faculties of the university of Helsinki who took part in the course to complete a ten credits minor unit in psychology.

Content areas/Disciplines: Cognitive and educational psychology, educational technology

Duration of the course: 3 months

No. of instructional hours: 24 hours face-to-face meetings + distance work

Additional background Information:
The course was a 2-gredit undergraduate course in cognitive psychology in the University of Helsinki. The course has been conducted once in this form in the spring 2002. This scenario also includes suggestions for developing the design further to include more advanced practices and tools than we had available in the previous course.

Course description:
The course consisted of six seminar meetings (3-4 hours each), collaborative work within a Web-based environment between the meetings and a final meeting at the end of the course to evaluate the experiences jointly. The seminar meetings in the course were organized so that the first two hours were spent in a computer lab, and the following two as discussion and group work in a seminar room. Initially, the computers were used to practice the use of Web-based tools, but later the students worked with the computers in groups discussing and elaborating their group’s inquiry work. A group of tree tutors were responsible for organizing the activities and guiding the students. The first seminar meeting involved context creation by introducing the goals and themes of the course and explaining the Progressive Inquiry framework and how it would be used as a heuristic model to structure the inquiry process. In addition, all students told about their interests and questions on the course topic. In a developed implementation it would be good to get the discussions recorded and saved for further use. The system could enable the arrangement of the recorded content into short sections (discussions on different topics) that can be linked with further outcomes (e.g. written input) of the students in a shared virtual working area.

After the first meeting, the students were guided to write an introduction of themselves in a shared area. The introductions could be made with a template that enables the inclusion of short descriptive texts, pictures and links to files and external information and be connected to usernames in the system. It would also be good to be able to start discussion with other members based on their introductions. In addition, the students were instructed to post their initial problems and ideas of the course topic in a common discourse forum in the shared virtual working area, and to comment on each others’ postings. The discourse forum included tools for creating notes that can include texts, pictures and links, and that can be commented, linked with each other and rearranged into new orders. The discourse forum tool included also built-in scaffolds to label each note by a knowledge-type label based on the Progressive inquiry elements (Problem, Own explanation, Comment, Deepening knowledge, Metacomment, Summary)

In the second seminar meeting, the problems created by the students were modified and classified jointly by discussing them. An elaborated way of working would be to use a shared virtual space in a face-to-face meeting to collaboratively comment on and re-arrange the produced questions and ideas into thematic groups. Based on the joint discussion, three sub-groups (including four to five students) were formed according to selected  research questions, based on the common interests of the students. Those research questions formed the main themes for the progressive inquiry process in the course, and each group was supposed to produce a jointly constructed final report of their group’s inquiry results at the end of the course. The tools should have tools for structuring the shared space according to the group formation and successive phases of the inquiry work. Also guidelines and supporting templates should be easy to integrate into the working areas in the system.

In the following meetings, the theories and ideas were, again, elaborated further jointly and in small groups by writing sub-ordinate research questions, their own explanations, and knowledge from scientific knowledge sources as well as by commenting on each others’ postings in a shared virtual space. Each small group has a task to pursue their group’s research question further by using various knowledge sources and by together elaborating their explanations and successive versions of their research report. Also the reports and experiences from previous, similarly conducted courses could be available for the students in the Web-based environment.

The process was guided by three tutors throughout the whole course both in the shared virtual space and in face-to-face seminar meetings. For instance, at some phase, the groups were explicitly instructed to comment on other groups’ ideas and drafts (although they are all the time encouraged to contribute also to other groups’ work by commenting on their ideas, giving hints of good knowledge sources, linking their own inquiry to other groups’ inquiry etc.), and in the last seminar meeting the students were directed to construct a concept map about the main concepts related to their inquiry problem before they start revising the last version of their final report. One lesson during the seminar meetings was conducted in the form of expert lecturing; the lecture could be recorded and saved for further use and the expert could continue the discussion with the students using the recorded lectures and discourse forums in the Web-based environment. Each tutor had a main facilitator’s role of some groups; however, all participants could take part in any group’s inquiry process in the shared virtual space. The students were provided with a lot of recommendations and links to knowledge sources as well as guidelines and templates for organizing their collaborative inquiry process and report production.

Before the last course meeting, the groups were guided to post the final version of their joint research report to the shared virtual space and other groups were encouraged to read and comment on them once again. Also the expert that gave lectures to the students earlier, could be asked to comment on the groups’ final reports through the shared space. In the last meeting, the whole process was evaluated together by sharing experiences and analyzing the group processes in the shared virtual space. It would be useful to have, in the shared space, some analysis tools that could help evaluating the joint process: e.g.,  save different versions of database content as a process history, describe the social activity and mutual commenting by using social network analysis methods. After the course, the students wrote self-reflections about their participation in the course; those self-reflections could be used by the tutors to develop the course further and by the students themselves to evaluate their work in the course. The evaluations should be saved together with the final reports to be used in successive courses. The requirement for course credit was to contribute actively to knowledge creation and mutual commenting in seminar meetings and in Web-based environment, to participate in the construction of their own group’s final report, and to write a self-reflection report at the end of the course.

Critical features/Requirements:

A possibility to arrange the face-to-face seminar meetings flexibly using suitable timetable as well as computer lab and seminar rooms.

It is important that there is no necessity for individual course credit because it could disturb students’ commitment to participate in the collaborative knowledge creation process.

Students’ final work assignment should be the production of a collaborative report (which concretely creates a shared object to the student groups) in order to reach the goal of practicing collaborative knowledge creation.

Rationale:

The course was organized according to the principles of the pedagogical and epistemological model of progressive inquiry that concretizes the trialogical learning process by specifying some essential elements for epistemological advancement. The starting point of a progressive inquiry process is the creation of the context for inquiry by presenting a multidisciplinary approach to theoretical or real-life phenomena. Then the students are guided to form their own questions about the phenomena and create their intuitive working theories as explanations to answer the questions. These stages are undertaken before using authoritative information sources, to challenge the students’ own thinking. The learning community acquires new information by exploiting various information sources after having together evaluated the ideas and explanations produced together. The process will be repeated gradually with deepening cycles of formulating subordinate study questions and more accurate theories and knowledge products. Essential for the advancement of a progressive inquiry process is that all knowledge objects and the phases of the process are shared within the whole learning community. The model is not meant to be followed rigidly, but it offers conceptual tools to discuss, organize and make visible the strategies and activities in the inquiry practice. The elements of progressive inquiry are often illustrated by the following figure (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Elements of Progressive Inquiry

Research Hypotheses:

• Students’ collaborative inquiry process requires proper scaffolding, structuring and pedagogical organization (“pedagogical infrastructures”).
• The development of students’ “metaskills of inquiry” require explicit guidance and reflection.
• Flexible tools for working on the knowledge in the shared space can promote deepening inquiry and collaborative knowledge advancement. 

Open Issues:

What are effective ways to support student groups in their inquiry process, especially in the exploitation of authentic scientific knowledge sources and in the formulation of novel and knowledgeable explanations and solutions?

Related tools and artifacts:

FLE3 (Future Learning Environments 3) system (http://fle3.uiah.fi) with personal WebTops (course list and folder/file storage). 

Good features in FLE3: Simple, easy to use, not too much functionalities; the metaphor of students’ one “WebTop” as a starting view; built-in scaffolds (“knowledge types”) to label the Knowledge Building notes & written guidelines present when choosing the label; a possibility to create own knowledge type sets; awareness functionality: the list of other course participants visible all the time; names of presently on-line members bolded; openness: other participants can go and see each other’s WebTop content.

Shortcomings in FLE3: File area (WebTop) and discourse area (KB forums) separated and making links between them is clumsy; not possible to explicitly form groups; process structuring only by folder structures in WebTop and by creating separate Knowledge building forums (“contexts”); not possible to re-arrange, link or modify Knowledge Building notes or note threads afterwards.

For future visions:

The shared virtual space should include various tools for supporting the collaborative inquiry process: discourse forums that include built-in scaffolds and linking possibilities; a document repository for saving, sharing, rearranging, annotating and versioning files that may be texts, pictures, videos etc.; a virtual white board tool for drawing concept maps and visual illustrations collaboratively; a video annotation tool for reusing the recorded discussions and expert lectures. All types of knowledge should be able to link with each other and be arranged in new orders and views. In addition, the system should include process tools that can be used to structure the inquiry process with templates, timelines, working areas etc. to support the iterative Progressive Inquiry process and group work organization.

Making of:

The course was held in this form in the Spring 2002. It was re-designed based on the experiences from previous courses in order to put more emphasis on student-driven inquiry instead of lecturing, and to define the inquiry task more goal-oriented and collaborative by a requirement of jointly constructed research report.

References:

Hakkarainen, K. (1998). Epistemology of inquiry and Computer-supported collaborative Learning. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Hakkarainen, K., Palonen, T., Paavola, S., & Lehtinen, E. (2004). Communities of networked expertise: Professional and educational perspectives. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Lakkala, M., Muukkonen, H., & Hakkarainen, K. (2005). Patterns of scaffolding in computer-mediated collaborative inquiry. Mentoring & Tutoring, 13(2), 281–300.

Muukkonen, H., Lakkala, M., & Hakkarainen, K. (2005). Technology-mediation and tutoring: how do they shape progressive inquiry discourse? The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14(4), 527–565. Available at: http://www.kp-lab.org/intranet/work-packages/wp8/background-materials/muukkonen_jls14_4.pdf