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Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer Conferencing

Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer Conferencing. Norm Friesen May 6, 2006. Terms & Concepts. Critical community of Inquiry: group engaging collaboratively in practical inquiry; usually includes a teacher

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Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer Conferencing

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  1. Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer Conferencing Norm Friesen May 6, 2006

  2. Terms & Concepts • Critical community of Inquiry: group engaging collaboratively in practical inquiry; usually includes a teacher • Cognitive presence: the construction and confirmation meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry • Cognitive Presence ≈ Critical inquiry

  3. Practical Inquiry Model

  4. Practical Inquiry Two Dimensions: • continuum between action and deliberation • transition between concrete and abstract worlds; cognitive processes that associate facts and ideas

  5. Four Phases (1 through 3) • Triggering Event: an issue, dilemma, or problem that emerges from experience is identified or recognized. • Exploration: participants shift between the private, reflective world of the individual and the social exploration of ideas • Integration: characterized by constructing meaning from the ideas generated in the exploratory phase: reflection  discourse

  6. Four Phases (4th) Resolution: • testing the hypothesis by means of practical application • a vicarious test using thought experiments and consensus building within the community

  7. Critical Inquiry and CMC • The CMC transcript is valuable in that it provides an accurate record of nearly all the dialogue and interaction that took place • There is no body language or paralinguistic communication

  8. Triggering Events • Asking questions • Background info that culminates in a question • Messages that take discussion in a new direction

  9. Exploration • Personal narratives/descriptions/facts • Divergence within community or within a message: • Unsubstantiated contradiction of previous ideas • many themes in one message • unsupported opinions

  10. Integration • Agreement within community or within a single message • Integrating information from various sources • Justified yet tentative hypotheses

  11. Resolution • Vicarious application to real world • Testing solutions

  12. Study of 24 messages; 1 week

  13. Conclusion • “We believe such an approach is capable of refining the concept and model presented here to the point where it can be a reliable and useful instructional tool for realizing higher-order educational outcomes.”

  14. Excursus on Content Analysis • This is an example of content analysis • a standard methodology in the social sciences for studying the content of communication • objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages. • Describe and make inferences about the character of communications

  15. Word counting • Early and simple version is to count word occurrences • KWIC and KWOC indexes developed for this purpose • Zipf's law: words and phrases mentioned most often reflect the most important concerns • "Primitive" version of this using Google • The issue of inference arises

  16. Other approaches • Coding frames used: identify concerns, infer concerns, themes, processes, etc. from text and label them • For example: Global Warming coverage • Types of guests or "experts" in news shows • In what contexts it is mentioned? Science, lifestyle, Economics, national/international politics • Other examples? (e.g. "issues, qualifications, horse race, and hoopla)

  17. Issues and Problems • inter-coder reliability and intra-coder reliability: • Is a coder or group of coders consistent across time? • Is a coder consistent with other coders? • Process of inference • "Television is the primary source of presidential election information for the majority of Americans" (Graber 1993; Hernandez 1997) • Discussion topics and themes reflect actual group or mental processes

  18. Rourke (2005) • “I analyzed the messages and the interview transcripts using qualitative content analysis techniques associated with grounded theory, and I employed measures to promote trustworthiness associated with naturalistic research.” • 15 weeks, 67 weeklong conferences for small groups

  19. Potential Problem • There may be a variety of technical, access, or deeper social, psychological, and educational inhibitors to participation in the conference, which means that the transcript of the conference is a significantly less-than-complete record of the learning that has taken place within the community of inquiry.

  20. Findings Their activities included: • providing others with praise and encouragement, • presenting informal arguments, • engaging in discursive explorations • making connections between course topics and their personal experiences

  21. Rourke, Findings, con’t • “Contrary to constructions of this technology in our literature, the students did not approach the conferences as forums for critical discourse or collaborative meaning making.”

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