Facilitating student collaboration through net-mediated technology

Lars Birch Andreasen, lba@dpu.dk

The Danish University of EducationResearch programme on Media and ICT in Education

Technologies, Publics and Power. 1-5 Feb 2004, Akaroa, New Zealand

Three generations of distance education

First generation: Correspondence teaching

• Technologies: Mail and railway; Perspective: Autonomy

Second generation: Multimedia based distance education

• Technology: Broadcast media; Perspective: Industrialization

Third generation: Computer based distance education

• Technology: Internet; Perspective: Communication and interaction

The case study – online course at a Swedish university

• The course took place entirely online– One semester, 40 students

– Web pages with resources, descriptions of the course, and assignments

– Electronic bulletin boards for communication

• Course design– Study materials: Printed books

– Assignments and essays on the books, individually and in groups

– Group project

Models of communication

Traditional model of communication

Sender

Meaning

Receiver

Utterer

Meaning

Utterer

Alternative model of communication

Bakhtin’s understanding of communication

”The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘ones own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.” (Bakhtin 1981: 293-94)

”Every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates.” (Bakhtin 1981: 279-80, italics in original)

(Mikhail Bakhtin: ”The Dialogic Imagination”, 1981)

Functionally divided collaboration

Interviewer: ”The first group work; can you describe, how you collaborated in your group?”

Student: ”Quite simple! The assignment was split into questions about the different chapters, and each person took a chapter. … So there was actually no discussion, just each wrote about his or her chapter, and one gathered it all in one document. And then we delivered it as a group assignment.”

Period 1

Ann

HannaDitte

Lena

Charlotta

Jennie

Period 2

Ann

Martin

Hanna

Ditte

Lena

Charlotta

Period 3

Ann

Martin

Hanna

Ditte

Lena

CharlottaJennie

Writing activity in a project group

Discussions on the net: Experiences with asynchronous, netmediated communication

• Time for reflexivity

• Shared ’memory’

• Several discussions at one time

• Even quiet persons can be ’heard’

• Changes in levels of impatience

• Easy not to communicate

• Difficult to make decisions or appointments

• Difficult to recall decisions