April 2012 Volume 15 Number 2 - Educational Technology & Society

Figure 5. Another shared group board with organizer for Chinese vocabulary learning
The organizer shown in Figure 5 was simpler. In addition to writing down the target word “得罪” (meaning “offend”)
in the centre of the board, the students in the group were only required to complete the tasks 1, 5, 6, and 7. In this
way, the volunteerism pattern can be seen at work. The students in the group can select a task from a list given by
the teacher which varies difficulty levels, by considering their group ability. The students also have an opportunity to
select the sections they are interested in or are familiar with to collaboratively complete them.
Underlying the intent of this activity is also the democratizing knowledge pattern. Due to the subtasks with different
difficulty levels and themes, all group members have an equal opportunity to contribute their individual knowledge
and ideas. Students who are not good at Chinese language can post the meaning of the phrase/word with the help of a
dictionary. Students with higher Chinese language capability can take the responsibility for writing the sentences.
Each student with diverse ability language capability can contribute diverse homophones and similar characters for
the given characters. Within the group, the task will not be dominated by one or two students. Rather, all the students
can play their role on completing the task.
When all groups have done their work, the teacher orchestrated sharing between the groups at the class level. The
teacher asked the students to visit other group boards to learn the words which were worked on by other groups, and
to provide comments to help others refine their group products. Students with different Chinese language proficiency
and groups with different ability levels will have an equal opportunity to receive and provide comments
anonymously. In Figures 4 and 5, we can see the positive criticisms (as circled in the figures) from other groups.
This scenario of GS activity took place in the beginning stage of integrating GS with Chinese language learning in
this class. Although the students were asked to give comments on other students’ artifacts, the majority of their
comments are consisted of words of praise and encouragement, but they were not constructive enough (see Figure 4).
In the following scenario of reading comprehension, we describe another scenario of GS activity in a secondary class.
In this case, when the GS activity was conducted, the class students had been involved in our project for a whole year
(one GS lesson per week). We have observed that the culture of RCKI in the class had already been fostered on a
certain degree. In this sense, it provides a prerequisite for enabling the more challenging pedagogical patterns to be
enacted and used effectively.
A scenario of reading comprehension
This GS activity in a scenario of reading comprehension embodies the patterns of improvable ideas and symmetric
knowledge advancement. The context of this activity is a 70-minute lesson for a Secondary 2 (Grade 8) class. In this
scenario, the teacher wanted the students to develop a good understanding of a given text by having them engaged in
collective cognition. To enable the students to contribute more diverse ideas and to seek continuous improvement of
their ideas, they were required to do both intra-group and inter-group work, thus realizing the knowledge
advancement not only at the group level but also at the whole class level. The activity comprises mainly the
following 5 stages.
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