The Support of Virtual 3D Worlds for Enhancing Collaboration in Learning Settings

Collaborative learning activities apply different approaches in-class or out-of-class, which range from classroom discussions to group-based assignments and can involve students more actively as well as stimulate social and interpersonal skills. Information and communication technology can support collaboration, however, a great number of pre-existing technologies and implementations have limitations in terms of the interpersonal communication perspective, limited shared activity awareness, and a lack of a sense of co-location. Virtual 3D worlds offer an opportunity to either mitigate or even overcome these issues. This book chapter focuses on how virtual 3D worlds can foster the collaboration both between instructors and students as well as between student peers in diverse learning settings. Literature review findings are complemented by the results of practical experiences on two case studies of collaborative learning in virtual 3D worlds: one on small group learning and one on physics education. Overall findings suggest that such learning environment’s advantages are a promising alternative to meet more easily and spontaneously; and that an integrated platform with a set of tools and a variety of communication channels provides real life world phenomena as well as different ones. On the negative side, there are usability issues in relation to the technical limitations of 3D world platforms and applications, which reduce the potential for learning in such collaborative virtual environments.

Teaching Routines to Enhance Collaboration Using Classroom Network Technology

This chapter presents an argument for the use of teaching routines (pedagogical patterns) to engage students in collaborative learning activities using the Group Scribbles classroom network technology. Teaching routines are a resource for structuring student opportunities to learn within lessons. They address known challenges associated with making the most of classroom network technology by scaffolding teacher enactment, enabling contingent teaching, and providing an anchor for expanding practice. In this chapter, the authors articulate the theoretical and empirical basis for using teaching routines to support diagnostic interactive formative assessment of student learning. The authors describe the goals and features of routines, types of collaboration instantiated in the routines, technological aspects of Group Scribbles, teachers’ perceived utility of the routines, and anticipated implementation challenges of the routines within lessons designed for middle school Earth science.

Using the Four Lenses of Critical Reflection to Promote Collaboration and Support Creative Adaptations of Web 2.0 Tools in an Online Environment

This chapter offers an in-depth narrative of how one instructor in an online environment used the four lenses of critical reflection introduced by Brookfield (1995) – (1) self, (2) student reactions, (3) colleagues’ perceptions, and (4) instructional theory – to adapt the use of Web 2.0 tools that have been found to be effective in promoting collaboration and constructivist learning. These tools can provide educators with the opportunity to examine collaboration and learning from multiple perspectives, while also serving as a way to rethink preconceived notions of how power is distributed in the classroom (Brookfield, 1995). In this chapter the authors share how the four lenses were used to design Web 2.0 activities based on the specific grouping techniques, with the aim to construct a rich online experience.

Blending Educational Models to Design Blended Activities

The authors claim that the potentialities of the socio-constructivist framework can be fully exploited when a blended approach is introduced. Our blended model does not only mix offline and online contexts but it also combines several pedagogical theories and techniques (Progressive Inquiry Model, Jigsaw, Reciprocal Teaching, Collaborative Communities, and Dialogical Knowledge). The particular mix the authors propose generates a specific pedagogy through which a set of blended activities is designed. Some analyses conducted on blended courses for higher education and professional development where blended activities were tested are briefly discussed. These analyses concern: (a) the students’ participation in blended context, (b) their expectations about the blended course and their perception about the processes of collaborative knowledge building, (c) the impact on students of role-taking, which is one of the blended activities included into the blended course. Results show that our blended approach has an impact on how students interact and talk in groups. At the end of the course, students display a collaborative discourse strategy mainly based on: (a) completing each other’s sentence, (b) complex trajectories of participation, (c) changes of the perception of the self and of the group and (d) the effects of role-playing.

The Role of CSCL Pedagogical Patterns as Mediating Artefacts for Repurposing Open Educational Resources

Designing effective CSCL processes is a complex task that can be supported by existing good practices formulated as pedagogical patterns. From a cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) perspective previous research has shown that patterns served as Mediating Artefacts (MA) helping practitioners to make informed decisions and choices, being much closer to the practitioners’ mindsets than complex learning design models, such as IMS-LD. However, a new challenge arises when the starting design element corresponds to Open Educational Resources (OER), i.e. free resources of high quality that are typically employed for individual learning. Recent research reported in this chapter has aimed to analyze the eventual contribution of CSCL patterns such as Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns (CLFP) in the repurposing process of existing OER for collaborative learning. Preliminary evidence coming from a set of workshops with educational technology experts shows that a small set of patterns drawn from a CSCL pattern language together with other MA, such as visual representations of Learning Designs, may be inspirational and effective in repurposing existing OER. Further research is under development that builds on the successful workshop format and involves practitioners in face-to-face and virtual workshops. This new set of experiences aims to analyze the effectiveness of the pedagogical patterns and other complementary MA in helping practitioners exploit the great potential of OER in the framework of the Open Learning Network (OLnet) project funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Modeling, Enacting, Sharing and Reusing Online Collaborative Pedagogy with CeLS

This chapter presents the potential and challenges of a new approach for the design of a platform aimed to foster and support the use of collaborative techniques in actual educational settings. CeLS is a web-based environment aimed to provide teachers of all subject domains and levels with a flexible tool for creating, enacting and sharing CSCL activities. CeLS special feature is the controllable data flow: the ability to selectively reuse learners‘ artifacts from previous stages according to various Social Settings in order to support design and enactment of rich multi-stage scripts. CeLS offers content free templates and a searchable repository of sample activities previously implemented with students. Teachers can explore these resources and adapt them to suit their needs, or create new scripts from basic building blocks. During the last four years the system was piloted by teachers from 13 Colleges and Universities and by school teachers. The chapter presents CeLS approach focusing on its unique features, examples of activities implemented with students and some insights on teachers as developers of online collaborative activities and as active contributors to the development of the environment.

Assessing the Performance of Learners Engaged in Computer-Supported Collaborative Problem-Solving Activities

Teachers often utilise a Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) strategy to teach a concept, a method, a problem, and so forth. Following guidelines from a script (based on a CSCL strategy), they must ultimately assess their students’ performance during their engagement in various learning activities; however, content and process assessments differ from script to script. Thus, a teacher faces a serious problem during content and process assessment. Here, the authors present a holistic framework for performance assessment and specify indexes for it. The authors aim to facilitate the teacher/evaluator’s work by equipping him or her with easy-to-apply tools and techniques for in-depth analysis of interactions. Finally, they describe our application of the proposed framework in an exploratory case study of a problem-solving activity in which a complex collaborative strategy is applied.

Using Role Play and Team Teaching as Strategies to Add Depth to Online Discussion

This is a review of an action research project dealing with the impact of a role playing activity in an online course. Two instructors of an online graduate course collected observable data based on response and participation levels of students in an online discussion setting. Subsequently, utilizing the same discussion topic, the instructors combined for a course delivery team teaching and role playing approach to the discussion. In the second course the instructors assumed the roles of John Dewey, Mao Tse-Tung, and Aristotle and exchanged responses and comments with each other and with students. A comparison of the levels of responses between the two approaches utilizing the same rubric allowed to measure the impact of role play and team teaching. A review of research related to team teaching and role playing as approaches to enhance discussions provides background to decision to utilize these two approaches to enhance the discussion process.

Testing Strategies to Enhance Online Student Collaboration in a Problem-Based Learning Activity

Most units of learning are being offered flexibly, either using distance education or online facilities, and often with asynchronous computer-mediated communication or online discussions. The use of asynchronous computer-mediated communication is believed to offer students the opportunity to communicate independently of time and place, and to ask questions, state opinions and offer advice when transferring interactive learning activities to an online environment. This chapter uses an action research framework to examine the quantity and nature of student engagement in a problem-based learning activity as a consequence of placing face-to-face instruction on and practice in problem-based learning prior to using asynchronous computer-mediated communication. The effectiveness of early placement of a 4-day residential component to improve student collaboration in the online problem-based learning activity was tested against six years (2001-2006) of electronically-archived online discussions in a 13-week, under- or post-graduate tertiary-level natural science unit.

Using and Acquiring Shared and Unshared Knowledge in Collaborative Learning and Writing

The aim of this study is to examine means of fostering videoconference-based collaborative learning, by focussing on three issues: (1) to induce collaborative learners to write a co-construct, applying (in addition to their shared knowledge) their unshared knowledge, which tends to be neglected, according to the social-psychological research paradigm of information pooling; (2) to activate these learners in their dialogues to exchange unshared knowledge possessed by one learning partner, so that it becomes shared knowledge possessed by both partners (knowledge transfer); (3) to try out, as an instructional support measure, scripted, content-specific visualisation, combining a content scheme with an interaction script. An experiment was conducted with 30 learning dyads, divided into three conditions of videoconference-based learning with application sharing: without instructional support, with content-specific visualisation, and with scripted content-specific visualisation. As expected, the scripted content-specific visualisation led to a higher transfer of previously unshared knowledge to shared knowledge. But, contrary to expectation, the scripted content-specific visualisation did not induce the learning partners to apply more unshared knowledge in writing their co-construct. Instead, in all three experimental conditions, learners brought significantly more shared knowledge into the co-construct than would have been expected from the distribution of shared and unshared knowledge measured before collaboration.