April 2012 Volume 15 Number 2 - Educational Technology & Society

when they are designing and implementing knowledge construction and improvement practices within the short
duration of a classroom lesson ranging from say half an hour to one and a half hours. The notion of “rapid” is
understood from 3 main aspects of a learning activity: 1) it is done within a limited time of participation; 2) it uses a
lightweight form of expression; 3) it must enable the participants to have quick cycles of interaction. RCKI focuses
on democratic knowledge sharing as well as cycles of individual and group knowledge enhancement.
The concept of RCKI seems suitable for guiding language learning, especially L2 learning. L2 teachers typically
handle the low proficiency of students in the target language by focusing primarily on vocabulary and grammar, and
hence approaches like ideas generation and expression are seldom adopted as learning activities (Scott, 1996; Stapa
& Majid, 2009). When cognitive load is not just expended on language expression, the enthusiasm and capacity of
L2 learners to engage in reading and writing in on-line based interaction could be enhanced (Wen, Chen, & Looi,
2010).
Based on more than two years of school-based research, we have articulated a series of RCKI principles (Looi, Chen,
& Patton, 2010). Our research team first articulated 9 characteristic principles of RCKI, some of which are built upon
the knowledge building theory and its principles proposed by Scardamalia (2002). In this paper, we categorize these
9 RCKI principles into different clusters in terms of the roles they played in fostering idea improvement. We believe
categorizing these principles can enable us to better understand the feature of each principle as well as the interfaces
between them, and thus provide a way to mine pedagogical patterns engendered by them.
Cluster 1: Principles that can be realized by activity design that promotes students’ participation
1.1 Spontaneous participation: designing for quick, lightweight interaction driven by students themselves;
1.2 Multimodal expression: accommodating different modes of expression for different students;
1.3 Volunteerism: let learners choose what piece of the activity they want to participate in.
Cluster 2: Principles that rely on or seek to transform students’ attitudes
2.1 Democratized knowledge: everybody participates and is a legitimate contributor to knowledge;
2.2 Epistemic agency: encouraging students to take responsibility for their own and one another’s learning.
Cluster 3: Principles that focus on ideas
3.1 Idea diversity: supporting the exploration of ideas and related/contrasting ideas, and encouraging cognitive
diversity;
3.2 Improvable ideas: supporting the exploration of ideas and related/contrasting ideas, and encouraging idea
improvement.
Cluster 4: Principles that require or foster higher levels of collective cognition
4.1 Higher-order thinking: encouraging skills like analysis, synthesis, evaluation, sorting, and categorizing;
4.2 Symmetric knowledge advancement: expertise is distributed, and advanced via mutual exchanges.
Pedagogical patterns
The term “pedagogical patterns” originated from the concept of design patterns. The word “pattern” as coined by the
architect Christopher Alexander (1977, 1979) refers to the core solution to a recurrent problem in a concrete context.
The notion of design patterns is also adopted in software design and development where it is used to capture and
share aspects of the software engineering experiences, and is a way of representing successful models for system
implementation (Goodyear, 2005).
In education, pedagogical patterns deal with the problem of how to teach (Fricke & Völter, 2000), by providing
structures to encode, share and use knowledge among instructors (Goodyear, 2005). The idea of patterns for
pedagogy as a means to present teaching experience is originally suggested by Lilly (1996) in the notion of “reusable
pedagogical design patterns.” The features include: a) they should be repeatable and easy to adapt; b) they should be
described in a way that allows them to be easily applied for different lessons by different instructors; and c) they do
not have to be novel or original; rather, they should communicate proven solutions to common problems.
“Pedagogical patterns play the same role in teaching and learning that design patterns play in software development”
(Seffah & Grogono, 2002, p. 18). The terms pedagogical design patterns and pedagogical patterns are often used
synonymously.
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