Analysis of Meaning Making paper
From VMT
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[edit] Instructions
- Provide a review of this paper. I will give this paper in July at the major CSCL international conference. Your feedback and suggestions would be welcome and timely.
- Comment on what you found relevant to the course in this paper.
[edit] Comments on Team Statements
- The group statements on this paper show considerable progress during the course in understanding and discussing the series of related research papers. I think this final paper would be quite difficult for most people to read, but the statements below show very good comprehension of its main points. As author of this and some of the other papers, I appreciate the effort that this took on your part and thank you for the very helpful feedback. I am pleased that you were able to figure out the research approach and to interpret the ideas in terms of your own experiences in the course.
- Gerry 10:02, 9 June 2007 (EDT)
[edit] Team A Statement
- Members: Brian, Olivia, Elizabeth
- Date and Time of posting: Olivia 20:21, 31 May 2007 (EDT)
[edit] Review
The paper discussed the lack of empirical analysis concerning how meaning is actually constructed. It cites examples where the term “meaning making” is covered but is never tackled head on. A possible explanation as to why this is, could be the fact that other researchers have just recently started to turn their attentions to trying to understand the role that meaning making plays in collaboration. Perhaps more time is needed for researchers to look more closely at the nature of the meaning making process. Stahl is obviously ahead of the pack in this respect.
Collaborations role in group cognition or meaning making is also explored in this paper. Group collaboration was promoted because of the contest idea. We are not sure that this really support true natural collaboration like normal exploration does by interest alone.
Another concern was how researchers were interpreting the observed online text conversations. “While careful analysis of small group discourse often reveals much about the problem-solving work of the group and its members, many other issues remain ambiguous, missing and even contradictory” (pg7). With this statement in mind, there could be some cause for concern about whether the researchers are reading too much or, possibly even too little into the conversations they are observing.
Meaning making is shown by the author as "the methods of interacting and explaining", which take place for group members to demonstrate. These actions include repairing misconceptions or misunderstandings as a result of this online meduim of communication and not face to face interaction. Therefore this truly supports group cognition.
[edit] Course relevance
The paper provides a list of preconditions for students to engage in group cognition for high-order cognitive tasks. Most of these conditions are applicable to this course since all of our group work and collaboration for our weekly assignments are accomplished via VMT chat (a type of CSCL environment).
- Intersubjectivity: This prerequisite for participants to be willing and able to interact with others as peers is definitely not a requirement for traditional learning environments. Prior to this course, learning was an independent effort where students would study on their own and complete assignments on their own. With the collaborative learning, students must rely on each other and utilize other's contributions to build meaning jointly.
- Opening of interaction space: The VMT chat and our Wiki site used for the INFO608 course are both shared interaction spaces, where all students can update/add to previous work, resulting in meaning making.
- Shared background culture: I have found that for this class, all the students I have encountered have a shared respect for learning. Most group members were skeptical and new to this type of group collaboration, but all were willing to experiment with this new type of learning. This type of "courage" and willingness to change are all characteristics of the same type of academic culture.
- Group regulation and group meta-condition: These precondition definitely applies to our course curriculum because our groups of learners do not have a fixed solution path for our assignments. In order to work together, our groups have abided by certain propositions, negotiation methods, and discussions.
- Motivation and engagement: These characteristics are necessary for this type of learning environment because it is easy to become discouraged and frustrated while working with unfamiliar group members. In this course, our group members must learn to overcome the fear and pressure of contributing ideas that may not necessarily be correct, or offering suggestions or disagreements to proposed solutions.
- Dialogic inter-animation of perspectives: Our experiences with working in different groups has taught us that the interaction of participants with different interpretative perspectives can be a blessing as well as a curse. If the group members can compromise their differences and work together, their ability to effectively make meaning can be very powerful. This has been the case with most of our groups; however, we have also witnessed lack of productivity due to differences of opinion.
Our group discussed whether these prerequisites would support new users, or whether new users would need to read all the background literature that our class has completed in order to understand the importance of group collaboration and computer-support learning. It doesn't seem that the users would necessarily be aware of these "prerequisites", but if they were to be truly successful in meaning-making, they would probably need to unknowingly fulfill these preconditions.
[edit] Team C Statement
- Members Ben, Kevin
- Date and Time of posting
Ben 10:06, 1 June 2007 (EDT) Group statement on reading. Meaning making in CSCL: Conditions and preconditions for cognative processes by groups.
Review: Group cognition does not only refer to mental content but can also refer to the ability of a group to work together to reach a conclusion that if made by an individual would be termed "cognitive". This theory is similar to distributed cognition but instead of symbol manipulation by artifacts it consists of high order tasks performed by individual members of the group.
One of the main goals of CSCL is to enable this kind of group meaning making and cognition, and to determine how this happens, and ways in which it can be ecouraged. Group meaning making is distinct from the individual processes of meaning making that takes place among the group members. This group meaning making is the result of all of the group interaction that has taken place, and, as stated above, resembles the cognition that would take place in an individual mind.
Relevance to the course: The article discusses a number of preconditions for students to acomplish group cognition tasks.
1: Intersubjectivity - Inside our group we do consider each other as peers since we are all part of the same MLS program. 2: Opening of interaction space - Since we do all our work inside the VMT program we share the same interaction space. This is even more relevent because our feedback is being used to develop the VMT environment. 3: Object of activity - this is particularly evident in this class. There is often a clear goal and topic which is the focal point of our group interaction. 4: Shared intentionality - This is related to 3 in that the problems and topics we deal with enable us to focus as a group on a limited number of objects. 5: Historical interpretive horizon - While the members of our group have shared the same history more importantly we share the same MLS program which provides the same foundation for all members to base the work on. 6: Shared background culture - our group shares a background culture, both in the broad sense of living in the same country, etc., but also in that we are both library science students and share many of the same references. 7: Member methods for social order - Since our group consisted of only two members we didn't have to talk much about the social order we just made everything work. 8: Designed affordances of infrastucture - While our group did not make extensive use of the infrastructure inside VMT we did use some of the features when they would benefit us. 9: Dialogic inter-animation of perspectives - as much as our group (and all of the groups in this class) share important cultural and historical backgrounds, every group member is still and individual, and therefore brings a different perspective. 10: Creation & interpretation of group meaning - the processes described throughout these points leads to the creation of group meaning. 11: Group-regulation & group meta-cognition - our group has used self-regulation in the process of finding answers to problems which have no obvious solution, such our group design projects. 12: Individual learning & interpretation - this can be seen particularly in the way groups work on group reading projects; each member reads the article on their own, brings their own sense of meaning and interpretation to it, and then uses a process of group negotiation to produce a shared group meaning. 13: Motivation and engagement - to some extent, our motivation has been set for us. The general goal of succeeding in this class will be shared by all group members
[edit] Team D Statement
- Members : Bertha, Jeeves, K8, Eric
- Date and Time of posting:Eric 19:18, 30 May 2007 (EDT)
Meaning making in CSCL: Conditions and preconditions for cognitive processes by groups (Stahl)
CSCL is a new and different environment for groups of learners that can provide a unique session of meaning making when certain conditions and preconditions are in place. This paper attempts to identify these conditions. There is a special emphasis on meaning making in this setting and historically it has been mentioned in a group process but no one has clearly defined it or attempted to provide a structure for how it evolves and works. Stahl has been using his VMT Math forum to study and analyze the online interactions between groups of students attempting to solve a math problem.
One of the first structures identified by Stahl was that of “math-proposal adjacency pairs.” Using the pairs or the smallest unit of meaning in chat that is structured so that it can be studied to determine a meaning making process in a collaborative online setting. This is brought over to this most recent study.
For a case study, Stahl has placed students in a controlled environment with a specific task in place. He initiated a contest for the most collaborative group and recruited students globally for prizes. He used the groupware forum of combined chat and whiteboard and recorded all the data. The forum also included a referencing pointer and a wiki to post results. After analyzing the sessions they found that there is a pattern in the group interactions. It seems there was much confusion as to who was talking about what, which part of the problem was being discussed and why. There was referencing problems in the chat function because there is no turn taking rules and lack of non-verbal communication. There is a lot of communication to fix the miscommunications. Even with careful analysis there are still many areas in the conversation left undefined even though the group was able to finish the task assigned.
Stahl goes on to describe the connections involved in understanding the intersubjective meaning-making process of the small group. The chat communication can go through many levels of communication in a short time. New ideas are proposed and accepted or rejected. Sometimes miscommunications have to be repaired and revisited. Things are being referenced and constructed on the whiteboard and referenced. Most times a adjacency pair is not together so to reconstruct the event you have to read back and forth. Stahl argues that we shouldn’t focus on the meaning itself but how the meaning is conducted.
He concludes with a list of preconditions that should exist to enhance meaning making in his forum. Some of these include simple things such as a goal, a dual interaction space or something like it, motivation and some group social order. Stahl suggests that his research is only the beginning to more research needed in this area.
I think the whole point here is that you can’t see the thought process of the individual members only what they type. If you could teach them to type out loud their thoughts then maybe some of the confusion would be diminished. K8
This week's reading provides a clearer explanation of the goals of the research being done in VMT. It is easier to see the applications of this research based on this reading. For example, finding the individual requirements for successful interaction will allow learning communities to make suggestions for self improvement in order to maximize benefits of the group interaction. "Technological responses to this problem have been explored" (pg5, ln 33) explains how language barriers, or rather the ability of individuals to interpret complex abbreviations and shorthand, can be minimized as a benefit of this research.
"In this way, “group cognition” is not something that exists somewhere outside of the interaction, but is a gradually emerging accomplishment of the group discourse itself (Stahl, 2006b)." (pg 4, 29-31) In this class, we have personally experienced how group cognition develops over time, and how we, without necessarily being able to define it as such, acted to benefit from the established group cognition. There are habits for working together we instinctively use each week to accomplish our tasks; many of us did not change groups despite syllabus recommendations because we had just established these instincts and feel we should benefit from the development.
[edit] Team E Statement
- Members Seth, Dave, Fernando, Lisa
- Date and Time of posting LisaG 22:51, 4 June 2007 (EDT)
Group statement on reading.
The paper by Stahl (2007) deals with meaning-making in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), and how it relates to group cognition, which supports, as noted by Stahl, the gradual emerging accomplishment of the group discourse itself. In terms of meaning-making, the concept of preconditions (for cognitive processes) seemed interesting to us. Essentially, this is the consideration of the logical and practical conditions that come about for students to accomplish collaborative cognitive tasks. Some of these (pre)conditions, as listed by Stahl, are:
- intersubjectivity - opening of interaction space - object of activity - shared intentionality - historical interpretive horizon - shared background culture - member methods for social order - designed affordances of infrastructure - dialogic inter-animation of perspectives
The paper was good in its visual representations, such as the chat summary and the screenshot of the workspace. This helped to prevent confusion when Stahl explained some of the referencing going on in the chat. There was some ambiguity on page 4 where references to "them" and "it" were a bit confusing. The preconditions for cognitive processes included "shared background culture". It is also interesting to note that all of the students are of similar age and some additional insight into how this affects the group cognition might be useful. Under the "motivation and engagement" section the group process can engender fear and pressures. More detail, possibly an example or an in-depth explanation would clear up exactly what fears and pressures can result from group process. One additional important point relative to the course is the idea of "member methods" the students used to "co-construct" meaning. As we progressed through learning the VMT environment, and worked in our groups, we did respond to each others postings, making suggestions along the way, as well as posting various questions. Over time, we learned to utilize the technical tools available within the VMT environment and often drew on our creative side to compensate for any constraints that presented themselves. Overall it was a very interesting treatise that blended good research with philosophy.
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