• If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Aaron Doering: Facilitating Collaboration Through Information Visualization

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 2 months ago

Facilitating Collaboration Through Information Visualization

Aaron Doering, Learning Technologies, University of Minnesota

 

 

One of the strongest predictors of online course success is the potential for computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). However, online instructors struggle to engage students in successful online collaboration.  Successful collaboration creates a community in which learners experience a sense of belonging and a perception that personal contributions are valued.

 

 

To help facilitate community within an online environment, a CSCL environment called “Visualizing Community and Actions” (VCA) could be implemented within an online course.  Specifically, there are four VCA features that influence the dynamic visualization and thus participation and sense of community among learners: quantity, quality, time, and personalization.  The quantity or number of threads or postings, the quality of a discussion, the relative time since other peers have interacted online, and the personalization revealing one’s unique self.

 

 

Let’s imagine that you are teaching an online course and have assigned your students to discuss their current findings on data related to climate change.  Normally students would post their thoughts and findings in a traditional asynchronous bulletin board format.  They would post their findings and may comment on two or three of their peers’ comments.  Within this traditional environment, the instructor and students have only knowledge on the quantity of postings with little knowledge on the quality of their postings (until they open each thread), when they posted their comment in relation to their peers (were the comments posted immediately before class?), and anything unique about the individual’s interests outside of their comments on climate change. 

 

 

Within VCA, the learning experience completely changes based on the size, color, location, and personalization of a student’s unique oval.  Within VCA, the quantity of postings to the discussion will dynamically increase the size of a students’ oval, the quality of the students’ discussions is indicated by the color of their ovals, time will be indicated by the proximity of a students’ ovals to the center of the discussion area and to other students who they have been conversing with, and lastly, each unique oval will have the opportunity to be personalized by the student allowing the students’ peers to gain knowledge of them outside of the communication space. 

 

 

Thus, of the three students who have been discussing, the green and orange ovals represent those who have been discussing the most as their oval is larger.  Furthermore, the three students have been discussing most recently as compared to their peers who are at the fringes of the screen.  The students represented by the orange and green ovals have been “on-task” most often as assessed by the instructor and/or the students’ peers.  The student represented by the red oval has been discussing most recently, but has not been on-task.  Lastly, each student has the opportunity to personalize their unique oval such as George did, the student represented by the orange oval.  You can now not only see when, how often, and the quality of George’s discussion, but you can visit his unique blog and web site.

 

 

VCA will afford the opportunity for learners to develop a sense of community by providing visualization tools that assist them in identifying their social presence and quality and quantity of interactions.  Learners will no longer be an anonymous or invisible presence within an online learning environment.

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.