Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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322 R. Wegerif and M. De Laat
Ferry, Kiggins, Hoban & Lockyer, 2000; Kear, 2004; Light, Nesbit, Light &
Burns, 2000; Strijbos, 2004).
Virtual learning environments (VLEs) and groupware applications may offer the
possibility for a shared workspace for networked learning communities, but may
not provide enough support or scaffolding, by themselves, for the community to
regulate its own learning activities most effectively. It has been argued by various
researchers (Duffy & Jonassen, 1992; Hakkarainen, 1998; Koschmann, Kelson,
Feltovich & Barrows, 1996; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994; Wegerif, 1998) that
group members working in a networked learning environment may be able to work
and learn more productively if pedagogical guidance and modelling is provided
within the shared space to regulate learning activities. In a traditional ‘classroom’
the teacher is an ever- present regulator of the learning activities of the group. In
an online learning environment, however, this function may be less apparent, and
the participants may have to be more self- and group- reliant in order to be constructive
learners. We argue therefore for a more group- or community- centred
pedagogical model to raise the social metacognitive awareness amongst participants
of networked learning environments (De Laat, 2006) and enable them to take
ownership of their dialogic space through a process of shared design, coordination
and regulation.
Discuss aims to provide pedagogically driven models and methods, by incorporating
them into the design of the tool and as such scaffolding social learning
activities from within.
In our view, it is important to support collaborative learning through information
and communication technologies (ICTs) by focusing on the group dynamics
that are needed to organise and coordinate learning and to support the clarification
and the aim of the discourse by providing insight into how knowledge is
created. Collaborative learning requires that the participants make their learning
goals explicit and necessitates particular learning skills to achieve them (De Laat
& Simons, 2002). We argue that designing groupware that focuses specifically on
facilitating the collaborative learning processes may help participants to regulate
their discussion. The hypothesis is that integrating models for collaborative learning
in the learning activities will stimulate the students to actively think and discuss the
social processes needed to successfully work on their group learning tasks.
In Discuss we introduce two models through which collaborative learning processes
might be stimulated. The first model is aimed at raising awareness among the
participants of the management roles that might help in the coordination of the
online discussion. These roles aim to stimulate interdependence and collaboration
(Forsyth, 1999; Johnson & Johnson, 1999). The roles introduced (see Figure
19.2) are: discussion manager, process manager, content manager, knowledge
manager and technical manager.
These roles focus on tasks required to support the overall collaborative learning
and tutoring process. By giving each member some explicit responsibility for the
community’s coordination of their collaborative learning, a heterogeneous community
is created that may be able to accomplish something that an individual