Facilitating student collaboration through net-mediated technology

1. Facilitating student collaboration through net-mediated technology Lars Birch Andreasen, lba@dpu.dk The Danish University of Education Research programme on Media and ICT in Education Technologies, Publics and Power. 1-5 Feb 2004, Akaroa, New Zealand

2. 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

3. 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

4. Models of communication Traditional model of communication Meaning Receiver Sender Alternative model of communication Meaning Utterer Utterer

5. 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)

6. 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.”

7. Writing activity in a project group

8. 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