Category Archives: Collaboration

Constructionism and Epistemology

February 22, 2019Book Club, Collaboration, Constructivism, Written by: Angie Kalthoff, Written by: Judi FuscoJudi Fusco

By Judi Fusco and Angie Kalthoff

In our book club, a question came up that is important. Where’s the epistemology in constructionism? Constructing something doesn’t seem like epistemology. Is it? If you’re not in the book club, that’s okay, keep reading as we’re talking about the question that was asked and not the book.

First, great question — we should really think about it! Before we answer that question, let’s make sure we’re all in agreement of what epistemology is. It’s a tough word. There are many papers that spend a long time struggling with how to define it. Since this is a blog and not a class discussion where we can write on a whiteboard (physical or virtual) and really go back and forth, here’s a simple definition with elements that we think are good for starting this discussion. (Feel free to let us know if you think something should be added to it.)

Epistemology: the theory of knowledge, including how it is obtained, how it develops and changes, what it is, and how the knowledge is verified or justified

Whew, that’s a lot. It’s all about knowledge. What do you think?

The original question was about how does epistemology relate to constructionism? As constructionism starts with creating or building something, where’s the epistemology? In a creative act of building or making something, a person has to get the knowledge that is in their head into an artifact. Because of this, the creation of an artifact is an epistemological act. The creator demonstrates their understanding (knowledge) in the artifact. They also may be verifying it or justifying their knowledge. (Again, feel free to disagree or think with us here.)

For example, when making a Scratch Program, the creator may work for a long time on making sure that the size of a character (sprite) is correct, or that two characters have a certain size relationship between them, or that the program moves the character to the right place on the screen. The creator may plan before they create their artifact or act as a bricoleur.

bricoleur — a person figuring it out as they are doing it with “whatever” materials are there

Both approaches, planning and bricolage, are ways to create. Students approach Scratch programs in both of these ways. In both approaches, the creator may try and fail multiple times. There’s a lot to be learned when you try and fail. When you fail, but you want to succeed, you try something different. If you really like something you’ll keep trying and building up more knowledge about what works and what doesn’t. (Constructionism talks about the work being personally relevant, if it’s personally relevant, you probably like what you are doing and are invested in the act of improving it.) The process of trying and failing as you create is an epistemological act. If you try multiple times it continues to be an epistemological act. (We’ll discuss failing in a future post as it’s also a huge important topic!)

As your students begin to work through issues, think about how you can be supportive in this process of trying and failing. How can you create a culture that values failure in your classroom? When working with students who have questions about “the right answer,” one way is to help them to think in another way about the issue. At first, this is met with frustration from students. All they want to know, in that moment, is if their work is “right.”

Learning to work in this new way can be very challenging for both students and teachers. It’s hard not to give the “right answer.” If something is open-ended and doesn’t have one answer, for example when designing things, it can be easier to work in this new way because you can think through trade-offs with students. But it can still be hard not to point students in one direction when they are asking. It can also be hard to let students “fail.” Going back to the relationship with epistemology, students and teachers have a lot of experience in instructionist-style classrooms where teachers give the answer; moving to a constructionist style classroom takes time and practice. One of the things you have to learn to do is to hold back on giving the right answer. It can feel like you’re not doing your job, but you absolutely are. You will still guide, you will ask questions, but you won’t just tell them the answer.

After Creating the Artifact
After we have the object, another part of the process of constructionism occurs. People interact around the object. Last week, Judi wrote: A lot of people talk about constructionism as learning by doing, and it absolutely is, but while we create, we should also discuss, iterate, and learn (create new knowledge structures, or modify old ones in our heads). Setting up conditions so students can “make sense” and learn is so very important in constructionism.

To me (Judi), this part of constructionism is equally important as the creation part. It’s also an epistemological act. If you create, you will absolutely learn, but if you take time to hear what another person thinks about the object, what they think you got right and what you need to work on, that’s really magical. It can be really hard to get the conditions right where people will work together and give real, honest, informative feedback on something. This part of the process really requires that people trust each other, get into a shared intellectual space, and then think together.

How do we put constructionism into practice?
Reading more about constructionism gives me ideas about how to get this to happen in a classroom. Of course, there’s not just one thing I can point to say “this” is how you do it. It takes time to develop this in your classroom. The first time you try, it might not be so good. I always encourage people to start small, but with something meaningful and to keep reflecting on what is working or not. Don’t try and change your practice overnight. One important thing to remember as you try promote constructionist interactions and use this powerful learning method in your classroom, you need to trust your students and they need to trust you and their classmates. Constructionism came out of constructructivism; remember we are trying to get learners to construct their knowledge and understanding in the head and in the real world. Knowledge is complex, is constructed by the learner, and learning happens gradually. (One more thought about shared intellectual space, take a look at another recent blog post for more information about what that means; a shared mental space is so important in learning.)

More on Epistemology
Angie adds: I remember reading Mindstorms by Seymour Papert and first coming across the word epistemology. I was making notes and highlights and then I encountered the word epistemology. I dug deeper into this word and went online to see what else I could find. I hadn’t yet heard of this word and was trying to find meaning in the work I was doing as a Technology Integrationist. This was it! This was what I was trying to capture. Yes, I could see how technology, when used as a learning and creation tool, can really transform learning for students. But I was seeking the why. I knew there was more going on behind the scenes than just adding equipment. In fact, just adding technology doesn’t necessarily change the way learning occurs. The thought of epistemology, as a way that changes how we acquire knowledge, started me down the journey of computational thinking and coding in classrooms, as early as kindergarten. And here I am now, digging into as many things as I can find to help and share what is happening beyond using a tool.

Constructionism really is a way we can help students engage in meaning-making processes for themselves. The more we can help them do this, the more they learn. Epistemologically speaking, we’re not giving students “knowledge,” they are constructing it in in the world as objects to share with others and in their heads with the help of those artifacts, classmates, their teachers, parents, and others. We hope this helped with the question; we’d love to hear from you as discussion is so important in learning! As we listen to the book club entries, we’ll try to capture tips and suggestions and make another post about constructionism in the near future. If you have a question, or anything you think we should include or discuss, tweet #CIRCLEdu.

The International Community for Collaborative Content Creation (IC4)

October 15, 2018Collaboration, Cyberlearning, STEM, Video Showcase, Written by: Sarah HamptonSarah Hampton

by Sarah Hampton

In my last post, we talked about how much there is to effective collaboration and discussed some of the things we should promote during collaborative activities. In this post, I will share how one cyberlearning project is capitalizing on all my favorite aspects of collaboration.

A few months ago, I had a chance to facilitate for the 2018 STEM For All Video Showcase, an online collection of very short videos from federally funded projects that aim to improve STEM education. I really enjoyed thinking deeply about my assigned videos and having conversations with the researchers involved, and, since then, I’ve enjoyed watching several more of the videos outside my group. One of these projects has continued to hold my thoughts. It’s called the International Community for Collaborative Content Creation (IC4). In this project, students from different countries collaborate online to create a media presentation, most often a video, that explains a STEM topic to their peers. The groups work across national, cultural, and ethnic boundaries to create these artifacts using tools such as Google Hangouts, Skype, Slack, and iMessage to communicate. Several things about this project are appealing to me:

Students are reflecting deeply on STEM topics, deeply enough to be able to explain them to others. The project team calls this “participatory teaching”. As Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” So, the expectation for meaningful content comprehension is embedded in the project. Furthermore, Project Lead, Eric Hamilton observed that, “If you combine helping people with learning, then instead of being in class to do well on a test, you instead are learning to help yourself and others succeed. The result can be transformational.”
The researchers place an emphasis on the process of finding and negotiating shared meaning. Coming to a shared understanding through interaction and reciprocal sense-making is called co-construction. Co-construction can result in a visible outcome like a jointly created physical product and/or an invisible outcome like a more sophisticated way of thinking about something. The students involved in IC4 are not passively receiving knowledge. They are actively co-constructing their understanding of STEM topics as they grapple with them in conversations with others and as they co-construct digital media artifacts. I highly recommend Learning by Collaborating: Convergent Conceptual Change, Co-constructivism in Educational Theory and Practice, and From Intersubjectivity to Group Cognition to learn more about how this plays out during collaboration and what it brings to the learning process.
The participants represent fundamentally distinct cultures, countries, economic, and social backgrounds. People tend to consciously and/or subconsciously choose to socialize with others who are similar to themselves. (That tendency is called homophily if you’re interested in googling a term to learn more.) At the same time, research tells us that diverse groups routinely outperform their homogeneous counterparts. And it doesn’t only benefit the group, it benefits the individuals, too.
Students are working on STEM problems that matter. One teacher said that initially students selected their own STEM topic, but in a more recent iteration, they were asked to choose topics from the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Too often, we ask our students to complete tasks that carry no real-world meaning, and I know that our world has untapped intellectual capital in our students – I see it every day! Why not allow our students to apply what they’re learning in their subjects to work toward solutions for ambitious real world challenges? After all, they are the ones who will inherit them.

Because I’ve been so encouraged by the nature of this project, I keep thinking about how it could be implemented on a larger scale, and like many projects that have piqued my interest, I am frustrated by the very real obstacles that would make that challenging. Right now students are participating in this project in club settings. I’m sure part of that is because of the difficulty coordinating online meetings in different time zones; parts of the project occur synchronously and other parts asynchronously. But I would love to see this become accessible for all students as part of their everyday classroom experiences. However, teachers are so constrained by their national and state mandated learning objectives that there isn’t much time for long-term projects like these. In my opinion, this is an absolute shame! I feel like we are sacrificing more important goals (international cooperation, shared meaning making and problem solving with diverse peers, and the UN sustainable development goals) for more immediate and measurable ones (subject/verb agreement and fraction operations). I’m not saying the latter goals are unimportant, but rather I am saying that there has to be a way to teach and assess the latter in the context of the former. We as teachers need to feel like we have the time, permission, funding, and support to pursue both goals during the school day. Otherwise, meaningful and ambitious projects like this will not be able transform education at the scale I think it has the potential to do.

Stepping beyond my teacher role for a moment, as a parent, I want this kind of learning experience for my sons. I want them to engage in real and significant problems with people they otherwise wouldn’t have access to without social media and a digital makerspace. As a parent, I would be willing to sacrifice three to six weeks of standard educational fare for that kind of experience. I remain encouraged by the fact this project is active and federally funded. Despite the lag between current educational research and widespread current education practices, I hope this suggests we’re headed in the right direction. I tend to be a wee bit impatient sometimes, so my husband has to frequently remind me that you only make slight adjustments to the course when you’re steering a big ship. I just hope that by the time my boys are in middle school this is the course we’ll be on.

Since some of my favorite aspects of this project are co-construction, diverse participants, and working on challenges that matter. I would love to hear your take on the project and your reactions to my concerns about the obstacles to running this through the classroom. Let’s see if we can negotiate some shared meaning online just like these students are doing. What aspects of the project appeal to you? What obstacles would prevent you from doing something similar during your school day?

Learn More

2018 Stem for All Video Showcase

IC4 2018 Showcase Video

IC4 Website

CIRCL Perspective on Project Lead, Eric Hamilton

Co-constructing Shared Meaning

Learning by Collaborating: Convergent Conceptual Change

Co-constructivism in Educational Theory and Practice

From Intersubjectivity to Group Cognition

Homophily

Homophily: Measures and Meaning

Homophily and Ethnic Background in the Classroom

Benefits of Diversity

The Benefits of Socioeconomically and Racially Integrated Schools and Classrooms

The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies

The Truth about Diverse Teams

Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-ability Problem Solvers

Why Diversity Matters

Why Diverse Teams are Smarter

How Diversity Makes Us Smarter

Broadening Youth Participation in Computer Science & Engineering

UN Goals

UN Sustainable Development Goals

Unpacking Collaboration

September 27, 2018Collaboration, Teachers & Researchers, Uncategorized, Written by: Sarah HamptonSarah Hampton

By Sarah Hampton

Collaboration. We all know that means working together, and we all know it’s an educational buzzword with a positive connotation. It’s one of those words that I kind of gloss over when I see it in a paper or blog. My brain kind of does this disengage thing like, “I get that concept. It’s old news. Moving on.” Well, you know when you ask your students if they fully understand a concept, the infamous question, “Does that make sense?” and they answer, “yes,” and you know they don’t? I didn’t fully get the concept of collaboration; I was doing exactly what my students do, saying “yes” and moving on. As I read this summer, I learned that collaboration may be something we talk about often, but there’s a lot more there than I thought. I know I’m definitely not ready to move on!

What is collaboration, exactly?

In the book, What do you mean by collaborative learning?, Pierre Dillenbourg humorously points out that, “When a word becomes fashionable – as it is the case with “collaboration” – it is often used abusively for more or less anything.” So what is it, exactly? At its core, collaboration is two or more people working together, but this can be deceptively simple. For example, collaborative learning shouldn’t be confused with cooperative learning in which students work together by dividing up tasks between team members and working independently. In collaborative learning, students must be mutually engaged in a “coordinated effort to solve the problem together.” Furthermore, merely asking students to “work together” is not enough to lead to positive learning outcomes, so teachers must be intentional about identifying and facilitating effective collaboration. (Tips for that in a minute!) On the other hand, students who are effectively collaborating may not even be in the same room together thanks to modern technology. I like how Mary Burns says it in Edutopia’s blog, 5 Strategies to Deepen Student Collaboration:

“In collaborative activities, we want to ensure that students don’t just occupy the same physical space but that they share an intellectual space—that they learn more, do more, and experience more together than they would alone.”

Why collaborate?

I knew collaboration was supposed to be good for learning, but I was surprised to see the number of documented benefits. In the Benefits of Collaboration, Laal and Ghodsi (2012) discuss collaborative learning (CL) and organize the results from multiple studies into social, psychological, and academic categories:

How can cyberlearning help?

I suspect what teachers (including me) have often called collaboration didn’t really hit the mark, and maybe we haven’t recognized collaboration when it was happening in other situations. Let’s take another look at a cyberlearning project we’ve talked about before to learn what’s going on during effective collaboration. Check out this post on Speech-Based Learning Analytics for Collaboration (SBLAC) to learn more about the project. In this video, the leader of SBLAC, Cynthia D’Angelo, talks about things teachers can look for during collaboration.

In your own classroom, you can look to see if everyone in a group is contributing to a new understanding or if one person (or a small number of the group) is doing the work. Good indicators include seeing group members verbalizing about what is confusing or talking through what makes sense. Making thoughts visible to others (e.g., saying what you are thinking or sharing in writing, a sketch, or a model) is a very important indicator that collaboration is occurring. You could even make your own rubric or checklist for what you are looking for as you walk around when groups are working together. Sharing this rubric or checklist with your students might help them collaborate better.

In the near future, I hope to see more projects like SBLAC that automatically code these indicators. It would be much more efficient to allow technology to streamline that process so we could focus on giving our students targeted interventions at optimal times.

What do you think? Did anything about the specifics or benefits of collaboration surprise you? Would you say you frequently use true CL activities or are you hoping to facilitate more for your students? Would you be excited or intimidated to use a tool like SBLAC in your classroom? How do you know if students are working well together? Leave us a comment–we would love to collaborate with you as we come to a better understanding of CL together!

I would like to give a special thank you to Judi Fusco for her time and endless patience as she recommended readings and discussed collaboration with me. Because of her, I experience the value of collaboration firsthand.

Favorite Tech Tools Series: Google Drive

February 16, 2017Classroom Technology, Collaboration, Mathematics, Written by: Sarah HamptonJudi Fusco

Edited 2/11/2018 to add the link to the gold award! Congratulations, Sarah!

Gold Winner: Sarah Hampton, Sullins Academy, Bristol, Va.
Lesson Plan: What Factors Correlate to Olympic Success? (Algebra)

By Sarah Hampton

From STEM programs to one-to-one device campaigns, we hear a lot about the importance of technology in the classroom. Like most initiatives, this is for good reason! We live in the digital age, and producing students who can responsibly and productively use the numerous technologies at their disposal is a crucial 21st century skill. Also like most initiatives, our tendency might be to view technology use as a bothersome requirement handed down by well-meaning administrators. When we approach anything with this attitude (read: the oft-dreaded professional development), we miss out on the spirit of the requirement. In this case, that means implementing technology in ways that genuinely improve student learning or enhance classroom organization and workflow. In this series of posts, I will share my favorite tech tools for streamlining my middle school classroom and promoting student learning. Let’s start with Google Drive, one of my favorite student-centered learning tools.

Google Drive
Technology is useful when it allows you to do something you can’t do with a whiteboard and markers, or when it allows you to do something better or faster. Google Drive frequently allows me to do both. You probably already know that Google Docs is a powerful collaborative writing tool. Multiple studies have found that web-based collaborative activities, done well, can promote learning outcomes, teamwork, social skills, and basic computing skills among students (Zhou, Simpson, & Domizi, 2012, pg. 359-360). In addition, I love how easy it is to give comments in Google Docs and how easy it is for students to work together. If you haven’t incorporated it yet, then make a class writing project a priority. Here is one example. If you are already a Google Docs pro, then check into using Slides or Forms. Our school frequently uses Forms for quick polls and surveys. Google Sheets is also a must have, particularly for math and science teachers. I would like to demonstrate how powerful this app can be by sharing how it helped me create one of my best lessons this year for middle school algebra (my class included mixed ages of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Algebra 1 students).

After watching the Olympics this summer, I started to wonder why some countries seemed to do better than others. I posed that question to my students and we brainstormed two main categories that we thought might correlate with a country’s Olympic performance: population (greater probability that gifted athletes live there) and per capita income (more opportunities for athletes to practice and/or have access to high quality facilities and equipment.) I had each student pick three to five countries, research their populations, per capita incomes, and total medal counts in the past four summer Olympics, and add their information to the class spreadsheet. Then, in groups, they created a scatterplot for their assigned factor and analyzed the data using linear regressions to see which factors more highly correlated with Olympic performance. If you want more specifics or want to see the results, then check out our class spreadsheet. You can also find instructions for a similar project at Mathalicious.

This project was organically cross-curricular and addressed multiple algebra standards by necessity. It incorporated geography, because the students placed push pins in their countries on a giant world map, and economics, because they wondered why some countries’ per capita incomes were very high or very low. It gave meaning to population density when the students saw the size of a country on the map and then noted its population on the bar graph. (Iraq and Canada have similar populations? But Canada is soooo much bigger!) It increased number sense when they created bar graphs, scatterplots, and histograms and realized that some of the values were literally off the charts–like the per capita income of Monaco (which presented the perfect opportunity for me to introduce vocabulary like “outlier.”) Astonished, students were naturally curious enough to research why. This led to lessons on digital literacy as we discussed how to appropriately locate, evaluate, and use information from the internet, a skill that is frequently overestimated in today’s students according to a study commissioned by the British Library and JISC (University College London, 2008).

The students really got into this project and even asked to do an extension! They hypothesized that countries with lower average temperatures would perform better in the winter Olympics, so, of course, we analyzed that, too. This matches perfectly with the International Society for Technology and Education’s claim that, “When students take responsibility for their own learning, they become explorers capable of leveraging their curiosity to solve real-world problems” (ISTE, 2017).

As it turns out, we weren’t the only people to look at what factors affect Olympic performance. After the project, my students found two websites that helped explain things further. The first was written by an economics doctoral student and the second by a senior editor at The Atlantic. (Bian 2005, O’Brien 2012) The other sites concluded that the same factors we studied were major contributors, and their charts and methods remarkably resembled our own, albeit with some more advanced statistics in the case of the doctoral student’s article. My students’ excited comments indicated that they felt validated in their reasoning and felt that they were doing “real math.”

This project hit the sweet spot: students were engaged in deep and relevant learning, and Google Sheets significantly contributed to its effectiveness.

How have you used Google Drive to create more student-centered environments? What outcomes did you see when you used them? Did anything (good or bad) surprise you? I would love to learn from your experiences by reading your comments!

Students proudly displayed their results in the hallway outside our classroom.

Citations and Further Reading
Bian, X. (2005). Predicting Olympic Medal Counts: the Effects of Economic Development on Olympic Performance. The Park Place Economist, 13(1), 37-44. Available at: https://www.iwu.edu/economics/PPE13/bian.pdf

International Society for Technology and Education. (2017). Essential Conditions: Student-Centered Learning. Available at: http://www.iste.org/standards/tools-resources/essential-conditions/student-centered-learning

Mathalicious. (2017). Hitting the Slopes. Available at: http://www.mathalicious.com/lessons/hitting-the-slopes

National Writing Project. (2017). Directions for Teachers Participating in Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future. Available at: http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/nwpsites/writing_our_future/directions.csp

O’Brien, M. (2012). Medal-Count Economics: What Factors Explain the Olympics’ Biggest Winners? The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/medal-count-economics-what-factors-explain-the-olympics-biggest-winners/260951/

University College London. (2008). Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future. Available at: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20140614113419/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf

Zhou, W., Simpson, E., & Domizi, D.P. (2012). Google Docs in an Out-of-Class Collaborative Writing Activity. Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 24(3), 359-375. Available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1000688.pdf

A Cyberlearning Project looking at Collaboration

July 7, 2016Collaboration, Teachers & Researchers, Video Showcase, Written by: Judi FuscoJudi Fusco

By Judi Fusco

Our last post discussed embodied learning and Cyberlearning. Cyberlearning is many different things; on the CIRCL site, we have an overview of Cyberlearning. In this post, we’ll look at another example: a new Cyberlearning project developing technology that may be able to help support teachers and the collaborative learning process.

It can be difficult to understand what is happening during collaborative work in a classroom when there are multiple groups of students and just one teacher. In a previous post we discussed how it’s hard for an administrator to walk into a classroom and figure out what is happening when students are collaborating because it’s hard to walk up to a group and understand instantly what they are doing. It’s also hard for teachers because they can’t be in all of the groups at the same time. Of course, teachers wish they could be a fly on the wall in each group so that they could ensure that each group is staying on-task and learning, but that’s impossible. Or is it?

At the end of that previous post, I asked if cyberlearning researchers could help create tools to better understand collaboration. When I did that, I was kind of setting myself up to introduce you to a Cyberlearning researcher, Cynthia D’Angelo. She has a project that may lead to the creation of a new Cyberlearning tool to address the problem that it is impossible for a teacher to be in more than one place at a time. Watch this 2-minute video about Speech-Based Learning Analytics for Collaboration (SBLAC) and see what you think.

Cynthia’s research is still in early stages, but all the practitioners I’ve told about it find it interesting and want it for their classroom. Here’s a little more about the project:

In this project, work is being done to determine if technology that examines certain aspects of speech — such as amount of overlapping speech or prosodic features (like pitch or energy) — can give real-time insights about a group’s collaborative activities. If this could happen, and SBLAC went into classrooms, then teachers could get instant information about certain things occurring in group collaboration even when they weren’t present in that group.

The proposed technology would require a “box” of some sort to sit with each group to analyze the speech features of the group in real time. One research question in the project is, “Are non-content based speech features (such as amount of overlapping speech or vocal pitch) reliable indicators for predicting how well a group is collaborating?” Initial results suggest this is promising. (Note, this technology doesn’t analyze the content of the speech from the students, just features of the speech. Hopefully, this helps to preserve student privacy.)

It’s important to support groups during collaboration because sometimes groups aren’t effective or an individual student gets left behind. This work, while it is still in early stages, could potentially help teachers identify groups having problems during collaboration. A teacher would no longer have to guess how a group was working when s/he wasn’t present and could target the groups having difficulties to help them improve.

If you want to learn more about the project, watch Cynthia’s 3-minute video shared at the NSF 2016 Video showcase: Advancing STEM Learning for All. Or you can read the NSF award abstract. Stay tuned, as we’ll have more about this project from two teachers who are working with Cynthia on SBLAC this summer.

SBLAC really requires teachers and researchers to work together on this hard problem about collaboration as it tries to create new tools to help in the classroom. What do you think of the idea? What do you think is hard or important about collaboration? What kind of feedback would you want on the groups in your classroom. Could SBLAC help administrators understand collaboration? Going forward, we’ll talk more about collaboration and collaborative learning, so feel free to leave questions or comments about collaboration, too.

“In collaborative activities, we want to ensure that students don’t just occupy the same physical space but that they share an intellectual space—that they learn more, do more, and experience more together than they would alone.”