Intellectual Journey of an Electic group
Tracking the Intellectual Journey of an Eclectic group of Symposium Participants
The participants in this workshop, from twelve different countries, represent multiple scientific and engineering disciplines and interest, and multiple research traditions. They include early career graduate students through distinguished professors. The areas of expertise include developing regions (Western China, Mexico, Africa) and interests not typically associated with international development, such as next-generation pedagogical agent networks, team problem-solving over international boundaries, courseware authoring, brain science and learning, software architectures that enable massive collaboration systems, and bandwidth compression systems. Each of these areas and the others that the DLAC October 28 - 31, 2006, San Diego, CA
participants represent, however, represents important points of potential intersection, where questions that originate in one domain might find explanatory results or findings in another. Much of the design of the workshop is to create conditions for a self-organizing complex system of ideas from which new (higher-order) ways of approaching or looking at difficult issues in learning might emerge [2]. For example, one set of topics that the symposium involves is “model-eliciting activities” or MEAs- an approach to case-based reasoning, especially in engineering education, that stresses the evolution of conceptual systems [3, 4].
Another set of topics involves “recommender systems” in large (>500 students) online engineering course environments [5], whereby software agents track the usefulness of learning resources and match distributed students by interests and needs. A third theme is the use of pedagogical agent networks that furnish instructional sequences over distributed settings [6]. The MEA metaphor of clarifying or disclosing conceptual models in engineering classes at first approximation differs markedly from the topic of agent recommender systems. Yet, such agent systems can be quite useful in facilitating collective problem solving experiences between team members located in different countries. They can help team members articulate conceptual bottlenecks and in so doing share important features of models that they might be using for a large task. Pedagogical agents not only furnish tutoring or learning objects, but also can broker peer-to-peer human tutoring relationships [6]. They can be adapted to large team problem-solving settings that include recommender systems in carrying out complex tasks in engineering courses. Integration of these three themes (MEAs, recommender systems, pedagogical agent networks) is one example of the connections that an eclectic symposium group of this nature can explore. In practical terms, such integration helps to point to directions for learning environments of the future. In theoretical terms, such integration can promote a framework for uncovering cognitive activity in distributed settings, because of the nature of the artifacts that such settings produce [7].
In order to build connections more intensively during the symposium sessions, three particular methods are being used. One involves creating visual connections in real-time between disparate ideas and approaches, using advanced concept mapping tools. Concept mapping has become an increasingly powerful and sophisticated knowledge representation tool [810]. A central challenge our group will face is representing the pathways and connections between theoretical frameworks. One DLAC participant, Tanja Keller, from the Knowledge Media Research Centre at the University of Tubingen, leads a daily discussion that departs somewhat from traditional text-based breakout or summary reporting of a series of sessions by leading a group co-construction of a series of visual maps that exposes new potential connections or research opportunities. Thus, one of the symposium artifacts is a series of visual tools to highlight research directions.
A second tool involves the international premier of a tool under development at SRI, International, under Jeremy
Roschelle, called GroupScribbles. Using TabletPCs, a post-it and whiteboard metaphor, GroupScribbles implements new forms of group interaction during activities such as presentations to promote social learning. It draws on the TupleSpace software architecture under development and research at SRI under NSF sponsorship [11].
A third tool is simply the use of a group messenger system operating during presentations, whereby participants can pose questions for a presenter in a group setting, while the presenter is speaking. A program chair then selects common themes or most asked questions, and of course questioners can discuss the presentation while it is underway. Each of these three systems - real-time concept mapping, GroupScribbles, and real-time group messaging during a presentation — are means to intensify the level of interaction during the symposium and to maximize the opportunity for new connections to surface.
References
(Source: golfsigns.org)
