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social and participatory media, online learning, knowledge-building, classroom action research, secondary school

Tags

Author

Gail Casey, Deakin University, Geelong, Oceaniagcas@deakin.edu.au

Knowledge-building: Designing for learning using social and participatory media

This report presents the results of a classroom action research that looked at how one teacher redesigned her curriculum while integrating social media, Web 2.0 and face-to-face teaching in an Australian public high school.

It explores the qualities that social and participatory media bring to the classroom while focussing on students as active and valued participants in the learning process. Building knowledge using the uniqueness of social media enabled students to become active and valued resources for both the teacher and their peers. Designing for learning is a key challenge facing education today; this case offers ideas for learning designers and contributes to a research base that can support educators from all sectors.

1. IntroductionToday’s youth are growing up in a digital world. Where and how they learn is changing as mobile learning and social networking become part of their every day life. As a result of this phenomenon, what it means to teach and learn is changing as new technologies make it possible to easily tap into the knowledge and skills that students bring with them into the classroom. Valuing their often hidden talents can be a difficult task within a high school cur-riculum program. As this research found, venturing beyond the walls of the classroom, to design learning that involves knowledge-building activities, is well supported by the integra-tion of online social media, Web 2.0 and face-to-face teaching; producing a flexible student-centred environment.

Course design using Web 2.0 technologies needs to be seen as ‘emergent’ (Mason 2008, p. 155). When designing the projects used throughout this research the teacher/researcher in-corporated concepts of student empowerment, user generated content, and the harnessing of collective intelligence which Mason (2008, p. 155) describes as a mismatch between cen-tralised control (traditional course design) and increased user control (course design reflect-ing Web 2.0 practice). This is a time where pervasive media and a technology landscape is becoming increasingly global, participatory and connected, one in which learners and teach-ers can increasingly become creators of knowledge rather than mere consumers of prepared messages and ideas (Jacobsen 2010).

Schools at present are justifiably wary of social media in their classroom. Over the last four years the researcher has been using social media in her classroom and, as a result, provided students with an environment involving more freedom and flexibility than the traditional classroom. A major issue of concern is that teachers are not available to monitor students twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; hence, an element of trust and understanding must be built. For some young people, monitoring their own developed online site for new activity or comment can become a seemingly addictive pastime but as Mason (2008, p. 70) discusses, there are many advantages in using the unique qualities of social media when in

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the classroom: they require students to participate, think, con-tribute and become active in their learning.

2. Research DesignThis research is a qualitative study investigating emergence, connections and designs for learning. The connections now be-ing made, outside the classroom, with social media and learn-ing, demonstrate that what it means to teach and learn is chang-ing. The researcher combined Graham Nuthall’s (2007) “lens on learning” with Luckin’s (2010) knowledge building pedagogy to help her conceptualise and analyse data whilst making links to social constructivist teaching in addition to chaos and complex-ity theories.

This study uses an action research method. The researcher is a PhD student as well as the classroom teacher and uses Arm-strong and Moore’s (2004, p. 13) framework of the action research spiral which explicitly seeks to encourage inclusive processes through research design, practice and process, and research outcomes. This action research cycle included the de-signing of learning experiences that combined social media with face-to-face teaching and Web 2.0. The data was collected over approximately 18 months commencing July, 2010 and was col-lected from all of the teacher/researchers semester long-class-es. The teacher/researcher taught 7 semester-length classes during the first semester and 5 during the second semester. The third semester of data collection was still in progress at the time of writing this paper. Students were aged between 13 and 16 years of age and the average class size was 25. All students during the first two semesters of data collection were from one Year 7 to 12 co-educational public high school in Geelong, Aus-tralia. Students were predominantly from mid-range socioeco-nomic backgrounds and the school student population was ap-

proximately 900. The data collected included teacher planning documents, field notes, student work, end-of-week reflections, mid-term and end-of-term reflections as well as critical friend and peer feedback. Students used pseudonyms when online which they could change at any time hence they often could not identify who a student was or from which class they were a member.

3. Designing for learning - knowledge building

Knowledge building pedagogy is based on the premise that au-thentic, creative knowledge work can take place in school class-rooms – knowledge work that does not merely emulate the work of mature scholars or designers but that substantively ad-vances the state of knowledge in the classroom community and situates it within the larger societal knowledge building effort (Scardamalia & Bereiter 2006). By using one online Ning each semester as a shared social networked classroom the teacher/researcher could observe the building and sharing of knowledge that occurred through formal teacher directed projects and in-formal student directed activities. One could also monitor the visitors to the Ning from around the world. At times classes en-gaged in global projects but the Ning was not used directly for these. It is interesting however, to see the selection of wider audience shown in Figure 1 which shows the automated visitor maps for each of the 3 Nings at the time of writing this paper (each computer’s unique identifier ensures that any one com-puter is only registered once). This perhaps shows some work towards building, what Scardamalia and Bereiter call, societal knowledge.

Throughout this research, students were faced with a wide range of tools which encouraged them to think, create and

Semester 2, 2010 classroom Ning Screen clipping taken: 19/10/2011

Semester 1, 2011 classroom Ning Screen clipping taken: 19/10/2011

Semester 2, 2011 classroom Ning Screen clipping taken: 19/10/2011

Figure 1: Visitors recorded on each of the three online Nings used during the research

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share. Multimodal methods of learning were at their fingertips and new literacies became part of the day-to-day learning cycle. Some examples of student work follow and are drawn from the large quantity of data collected as students used a wide range of Web 2.0 tools. These included:

• Survey generators - http://polldaddy.com/ • Picture podcasting - http://voicethread.com/, http://www.

voki.com/, http://blabberize.com/• Photo editing - http://www.picnik.com/, http://click7.org/

image-mosaic-generator/?create, http://zoom.it/arOi• Word clouds - http://www.tagxedo.com/, http://www.

wordle.net/• Cartoon makers - http://www.toondoo.com/, http://www.

makebeliefscomix.com/• Movie making with copyright free music - http://animoto.

com/• Animation creators - http://www.xtranormal.com/

watch/6919105/identity-theft-2• Picture globe generator - http://taggalaxy.de/• Picture editor - http://www.picnik.com/ • Mind mapping - https://bubbl.us/, http://www.wallwisher.

com/• Real world pictures - http://www.google.com/earth/index.

html, http://photosynth.net/, http://maps.google.com/• Timeline creator - http://www.timetoast.com/• QR code generator - http://www.mobile-barcodes.com/

qr-code-generator/• Data visualization - http://ghs2011.ning.com/group/data-

visualisation

Knowledge-building represents an attempt to refashion educa-tion in a fundamental way (Scardamalia & Bereiter 2006, p. 97) so that it becomes a coherent effort to initiate students into a knowledge-creating culture. The following discussion of student work provide ex-amples of students not only developing knowledge-building competencies but also coming to see them-selves and their work as part of, what Scardamalia and Bereiter call, the civilisation-wide effort to advance knowledge frontiers. In this context, the integration of social media, Web 2.0 and face-to-face teaching became a realistic means for students to connect with this civilisation-wide knowledge and to make their classroom work a part of it. This is a shift from treating students as learners and inquirers to treating

them as members of a knowledgbe building community (Scar-damalia & Bereiter 2006, p. 98).

Figure 2 shows a screen clip of an animated podcast made by a Year 7 (13 year old) student during an Internet safety project. This was made using a ‘Voki’ at http://www.voki.com/ and this can be heard by following the link below the screen clip. The work involved students choosing an animated character fol-lowed by them choosing a character voice. They then typed an Internet safety message onto the screen which was read aloud by the animated character when their work was published. Students were keen to hear each others Voki and struggling students quickly understood the requirements of the task by watching the work of their peers. Learning occurred not only by students producing their own work but by listening to the work of others.

Figure 2: Animated podcast made by a student using a ‘Voki’ for an Internet Safety project, http://ghs2010.ning.com/group/internetsafety?groupUrl=internetsafety&id=6203891%3AGroup%3A4301&xg_pw=&page=2#commentsScreen clipping taken: 17/10/2011, 4:28 PM

Figure 3: Video clip made by a student using ‘Animoto’ for a digital footprints project, http://ghs2010.ning.com/group/digitalfootprints, Screen clipping taken: 17/10/2011, 4:28 PM

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Figure 3 shows a 30 second long video made online by a Year 7 student using Animoto (http://animoto.com/) during a digital footprints project. By using Animoto the student could upload their own still pictures and select from a wide variety of music which is free of copyright to add to their video. Students en-joyed watching the created works of their peers and this moti-vated them to learn the concepts of the project, complete the task and to integrate their own creativity, knowledge and skills.

4. Designing for learning - Integrating Social and Participatory Media with Face-to-Face teaching

Many students, in the developed world, come with knowledge that enables them to create, connect and form a partnership in the learning process; but these are not widely used in the classroom, as discussed by Thomas and Brown.

“The kind of learning that will define the twenty-first century is not taking place in a classroom – at least not in today’s classroom. Rather, it is happen-ing all around us, everywhere, and it is powerful”. (p. 17)

Authentic integration of ICT is important if one is to think differently about learning and to explore ways to reproduce some of Thomas and Brown’s ideas of twenty-first century powerful learning. Throughout her research, the teacher/researcher found that she had to, at times, “unlearn” many of her traditional teaching practices and to be-come part of a community of learners with her students.

Social media are about the content and the building of a sense of community. Using a social network, such as a Ning, in the class-room allowed the teacher/researcher not only to incorporate multimedia and multi-modal texts but also to share these quickly and easily, providing a collaborative learn-ing environment for students to commu-nicate. By incorporating social media into the day-to-day lives of students in the class-

room, new literacies, that are becoming part of students’ out-of-school lives, were also easily incorporated. These concepts are supported by many academics including Alvarez (2001), Fletcher, (2007) Glover and Oliver (2008) and Hahn (2008). Aca-demic interest in the consequences of the use of technology and the use of media in the expansion of knowledge and the development of learning and pedagogy, have shifted away from the linear issues of ‘use’ and ‘outcomes’ to more nuanced con-cerns with the design and evaluation of learning technologies, as well as the social complexities of their use (Selwyn & Loliver 2011).

Figure 4: How I spend my time project – students collected their own data which they published & communicated online.

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Luckin (2010, p. 169), when discussing new opportunities for learning, describes the increased connectivity between people and between the physical and virtual realities of their world. Examples of this can be seen in Figure 4, 5 and 6 where stu-dents connect with each other through projects that contained elements that related to their real lives. When students shared their analysis and published work online, it supported students in a variety of ways. Some students used it as a support struc-ture for their own work and others engaged in a comparison with their own work while some preferred to provide critical commentary. All students are different and as Luckin (2010, p. 173) points out; “we need to pause and consider how we might take more of a learner’s resources into account when designing technology-rich learning activity and, as a result, how we may do better by our learners”.

Figure 4 is a screen clip showing a student’s published analysis and graph of the data they collected on how they spend their time during a specific week; this student’s pseudonym was ‘Mouse’ at the time the screen clip was taken. Through this project, students gained a deeper understanding of themselves and their daily lives as well as an awareness of how they differ from their peers. Students were not only engaged but motivated to gain the skills and knowledge which allowed them to collect, create, publish and compare themselves with others because this enabled them to connect, converse and share this informa-tion with their peers online. This was one of a number of occa-sions when students achieved a series of very complicated proc-

esses; processes that would normally take them up to five periods (250 minutes) to complete were completed in only one or two periods (up to 100 minutes). During these occasions a buzz ex-isted in the classroom and students would be out of their seat asking each other for help, compar-ing notes and being enthusiastically supportive to their peers. The online medium also offered al-ternatives which helped some students avoid the face-to-face shyness and awkwardness of other modes of sharing such as exchanging physical sheets of paper, moving into physical groups and standing out the front of the classroom present-ing PowerPoint slides.

When discussing our networked society, Bonk (2009, p. 327) asserts that this new economy now includes mul-tiple voices and viewpoints that can be raised, debated and ex-tended, based on personal experiences and observations. But who helps to ready our students for such an economy? Figures 5 and 6 are screen clips from the classroom Ning showing exam-ples of these multiple voices. These voices provided supportive and constructive peer feedback that continued to evolve over time through the action research cycle. The teacher/researcher believes that she had far greater success with developing stu-dent voices online when comparing peer feedback with her face-to-face classroom. When using student face-to-face feedback, often students would quickly loose interest in their peers’ work and provided little if any constructive feedback; class time given to this type of activity usually led to students being distracted from the task. Students in Figure 5 produced ‘supporting’ mate-rials for their peers and in return their peers provided feedback to support improvement of work, as can be seen in the number of replies in the screen clip. The Ning provided a mechanism for students to share their skills and knowledge, to help others, and hence not only to become active in the teaching and learning process but to become valued participants. Students became increasingly aware of their online voices, and their growth as digital citizens was essential as the research progressed.

Figure 6 shows a screen clip of three examples of peer feedback and some initial peer assessment. For a student to be able to provide this type of feedback they must have an understanding of the requirements of the task and what their peer has done as well as how their feedback will help their peer achieve success. This type of assessment was kept simple and students were ex-pected to give a high (H), medium (M) or low (L) assessment to

Figure 5: The number of peer replies to student made help videos varied depending on the video topic and how long the video took to publish.

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three of their peers. Students generally found it easy to under-stand the concept of; a low, not complete and little effort; high, complete and enjoyable to view; medium, not high or low. This type of assessment moved the teacher/researcher away from detailed rubrics and wordy descriptions of assessment expecta-tions. The Ning social network enabled student feedback and assessment to be open but supportive and students were able to learn from each other using the open publishing nature of the online social networking system. Training students to critique and assess continued to be a challenging and evolving process.

4. ConclusionBuilding a shared framework for learning was made possible by using the action research cycle to develop different ways for students to construct and share their skills and knowledge. This included using their phones to scan, take pictures and upload content. During one semester, there were more than 150 stu-dents sharing the one Ning and these students made more than forty online student directed groups where, within the normal school rules of behaviour, they were able to express themselves freely. Students needed support and scaffolding, not only to as-sist them in helping their peers in the learning process, but also to understand and embed the wide range of Web 2.0 tools. The teacher was also new to many of these practices and needed to work with the students as partners in the learning process.

• Students came with knowledge and skills and were encour-aged to use and further develop these as well as to share them.

• Social networking was used to enable students to become the resources for their peers.

• Peer-to-peer feedback was set up so that each student had 3 peers to provide feed-back for improvement and assessment.

• Work was presented via a range of media and published, for all to share and to see, in ways which could be used as models for other students.

• Students produced help tutorials to sup-port the learning of others and connected learning occurred; hence, the class frame of thought moved past the concept of ‘cheat-ing’ and into a shared framework of learn-ing.

To monitor and participate in the Ning required an increase in the teacher’s work time. As a partial counter-balance, it was found that the teacher/researcher successfully reduced her time spent on correction by implementing peer and self-assess-ment with students and by making more effective use of her classroom observations. This led to a valuable triangulation of assessment data. Reviewing many of the screen clips collected in this study, one can see the diversity of roles and activities in which the students engaged. Initial analysis of the research data suggests that by combining Web 2.0, face-to-face teaching and social media, where students made online friends and used pseudonyms, has changed the way they work, communicate and learn but as Hattie (2008, p. 240) reminds us, the beliefs and conceptions held by teachers need to be questioned – not because they are wrong (or right) but because the essence of good teaching is that teacher expectations and conceptions must be subjected to debate, refutation and investigation. It is of note that this research is of an extended process where ‘en-gagement’ would not be sufficient. It was not a trial of a ‘good idea’ over a week or two, but lasting almost six months with each student group. This meant that one or two interest-grab-bing ideas would not be sufficient to sustain the process and ac-tually changing the way student learning occurred in the class-room, using resources both physical and online, was essential. It was also essential that the teacher gave ground to the students, learnt with the students and learnt from the students.

There has been much research done on teaching and learning in the traditional classroom. In the normal context of the class-room even the most experienced, sensitive teacher is unable to measure how students internalise and make sense of classroom activities (Collins & O’Toole 2006, p. 609). Graham Nuthall’s re-search, as discussed by Collins and O’Toole, shows that, what

Figure 6: Students giving peers feedback and assessment.

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matters to teachers is that they provided their students with positive experiences, that there was a good atmosphere in their classes, that students felt safe and successful in their learning activities, that personal difficulties could be worked out and that life was happy and good for them and their students. Nuthall’s research challenges educators to value these but to also move to accepting responsibility for greater student understanding. This is fundamental to effective teaching and learning and the challenge is to have students demonstrate their understanding in practice (Collins & O’Toole 2006, p. 609). Social and participa-tory media allows more than just the teacher to be the judge of this understanding of practice.

AcknowledgementThe author would like to thank her Deakin PhD Supervisor, Pro-fessor Terry Evans, for his ongoing assistance throughout the study and acknowledge the quality of his advice.

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Copyrights The texts published in this journal, unless otherwise indicated, are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivativeWorks 3.0 Unported licence. They may be copied, distributed and broadcast pro-vided that the author and the e-journal that publishes them, eLearning Papers, are cited. Commercial use and derivative works are not permitted. The full licence can be consulted on http://creativecommons.org/licens-es/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Edition and productionName of the publication: eLearning Papers ISSN: 1887-1542Publisher: elearningeuropa.infoEdited by: P.A.U. Education, S.L.Postal address: c/Muntaner 262, 3r, 08021 Barcelona (Spain)Phone: +34 933 670 400Email: editorial@elearningeuropa.infoInternet: www.elearningpapers.eu

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