no more band-aids
WordPress in red, blackboard in blue. Showing the number of CoI presences indicated per day in each platform. WordPress consistently showed more fully-rounded presences (social, teaching and cognitive) while blackboard more commonly was restricted to just 1 or 2 simultaneous presences. Interesting.
The Community of Inquiry coding data, aggregated and compared. The WP posts showed more indicators of cognitive, teaching and social presence, across the board. Also interesting is that the instructor was only minimally active in WP – the teaching presence indicators were made by students…
I’ve finally entered all of the metadata information for the online discussions I’m using in my thesis. This includes the person who posts something, the date, and the size of the post. I worked through my earlier visualization mockup, and wanted to try it with the full set of data. So, here’s the Blackboard discussions (top image) and WordPress blog posts (bottom image):
It’s only the most basic of metadata, but already differences in activity patterns are becoming apparent. Both images are on the same time- and size- scales. The WordPress discussions appear to be using significantly longer posts and comments, spread over much more time. Blackboard discussions appear to be shorter posts, over briefer durations.
Next up, I get to code each post for Community of Inquiry model “presences” – as described by indicators for social, cognitive and teaching contributions in the posts. I’ll figure out some way to overlay that information on top of the basic metadata visualization.
Xin, C. (2012). A Critique of the Community of Inquiry Framework. The Journal of Distance Education, 26(1). Retrieved from http://www.jofde.ca/index.php/jde/article/view/755/1333
Thanks to Stephen Downes for pointing this paper out. I’m up to my eyeballs, processing data for my Community of Inquiry based MSc research, and could have missed this.
The Community of Inquiry model provides a framework for describing interactions within a community or classroom environment. It involves using textual analysis and coding of messages to interpret the type of interaction for each message – whether it involves social, teaching, or cognitive components. As I’ve been coding the data for my thesis, I’ve been adding as many types of “presences” as are appropriate – a message may include a number of things, indicating social, teaching and cognitive presences in a non-exclusive manner. I’m imagining each message having its own little Venn diagram for Social/Teaching/Cognitive component, as per the CoI model. It’s a simplification and abstraction, certainly, but looking at the coded output, I think it’s still got a fair bit of fidelity to describe the interactions at a high level. In my data, I’m also adding coding to describe the type of content (links, images, attachments, embedded media, etc…) as well as how involved the message is (is it a simple one-liner? a 2 paragraph response? a multi-page essay?) – and I’m thinking about how to include data on the timeline of the discussion (how rapid were the responses? staccato rapidfire conversation, or long drawn-out periods of silence?) I’m still thinking about how to represent that kind of data for an online discussion, but I think there’s something there, there.
Continue reading “Notes: Xin (2012): A Critique of the Community of Inquiry Framework”
Zydney, J. M., deNoyelles, A., & Kyeong-Ju Seo, K. (2012). Creating a community of inquiry in online environments: An exploratory study on the effect of a protocol on interactions within asynchronous discussions. Computers & Education, 58(1), 77–87. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2011.07.009
Abstract:
The purpose of our research was to examine the influence of an online protocol on asynchronous discussions. A mixed-methods study compared two online graduate classes: one that used a protocol and one that did not use a protocol for the same discussion about a complex reading. Analysis of the data revealed that the online protocol more evenly distributed the presence of cognitive, social, and teaching elements necessary to create and sustain an online community of inquiry. Use of the protocol also promoted more shared group cognition and more student ownership of the discussion and empowered students to facilitate themselves, helping to reduce the instructor workload. These findings may enable educators to provide more dynamic interaction and richer learning experiences in asynchronous online environments.
purpose and context of the study:
Given the literature concerning online discussions, the use of protocols could prove particularly powerful to support both students and teachers. Concerning instructional design and organization, protocols may provide a very structured discussion prompt, which let students know their role, giving built-in supports leading to a progression in thought. However, it is still open-ended enough so that students can select their own topic, experiencing more ownership of the discussion. Protocols may reduce the instance of discussion monologues, since the protocol explicitly requires interaction. Because the protocol spells out who should post and who should respond at a given time, there is no need for a specific facilitator, as the participants essentially facilitate themselves.
they looked at 2 fully-online grad-level classes in a higher-ed setting. n=12 and n=14.
on protocol vs. non-protocol:
The protocol class received the “Save the Last Word for Me” protocol (McDonald et al., 2003), which was modified for an online discussion forum. In this protocol, at the beginning of the week, half the students were asked to post a quote from the reading, which they thought was important but particularly complex. They were told not to reveal the reasoning behind their selection of the quote. Then during the middle of the week, two students posted a reaction to each quote. At the end of the week, the students who posted the quote revealed their original interest in the passage and what they learned from reading the reactions from the other two students. This discussion was then repeated the following week with the other half of the students posting the quotes for discussion.
The non-protocol class received the open-ended discussion question: “How does thinking about a concept from multiple perspectives help or hinder the learner from gaining a deeper understanding?” The students responded to this initial prompt based on their readings and then replied to at least one other student’s response.
Results:
Overall, there was a more even distribution for the protocol group among cognitive, social, and teaching presences than in the non- protocol group, as shown in Table 2. Further analysis was done for the categories within each of these elements as described in the following sections.
so, with protocol, more people were more actively engaged, rather than a few keeners hogging all the fun.
Based on our analysis of this data, there were several interesting differences between the protocol and non-protocol discussions. For example, the protocol group had a more balanced distribution of the three presences than the non-protocol group. This is more reflective of the COI model, which emphasizes that all three presences have to meaningfully interact in order to facilitate a successful learning community (Garrison et al., 2000, 2010). The protocol group also demonstrated more shared group cognition than individual cognition. This increased interaction likely resulted from the structure of the activity and the defined roles for communication that prompted students to reply to one another to problem solve how to interpret the quotes selected.
This would be handy to look at differences in discourse between 2 different classes. Less relevant for my research, since both groups are in the same class, with the same instructor, doing the same activities. But if they weren’t, perhaps varying protocol used by different instructors could explain varying levels of engagement…
There’s a PROTOCOL to be followed!
When I started at the Teaching & Learning Centre, I knew a bit about what Randy Garrison was doing – he was the new Director of the TLC, and he’d been working on something called “[community of inquiry](http://communitiesofinquiry.com)” – but I didn’t know too much more than that. I didn’t pay it much attention, since it didn’t overlap what I was doing very much.
Years passed, and I’m now planning the research proposal for my MSc thesis. And it turns out that the Community of Inquiry model is probably the best fit for what I want to do to investigate differences in discourse between two cohorts. More info on my research proposal at a later date…
Basically, what Community of Inquiry does is to take a look at the discourse of a community, from three overlapping perspectives:
* cognitive presence
* ability of participants to construct meaning through sustained communication
* social presence
* ability of participants to project their personal characteristics into the community
* teaching presence
* design, facilitation, and direction of the community processes
You take the discourse of a community, crunch it through some latent content analyses, and get an idea for how the participants fit together along the three perspectives.
The really appealing thing about the COI model is that it has been [used by several researchers](http://communitiesofinquiry.com/references) to investigate various communities, so it’s got some validity and rigour behind it. That’ll make my job much easier, as I won’t have to spend as much time designing and defending the analysis framework…
I found it pretty interesting that my poking around with research proposal planning lead me right to Randy’s work. What are the chances that you’d happen to be working for one of the key researchers in a field?