Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the E-Learn 2009 conference, both to present some of our ongoing work at Grockit and to learn from others in the field. In this post, I’ll describe a bit about our contribution, and in a companion post, I’ll share some highlights from the talks that I heard.
The slides above were prepared to accompany my paper, Interaction synchronicity in web-based collaborative learning systems. Here’s a summary:
In building a web-based platform to support live collaborative learning online, we’ve faced (and continue to face) a variety of technical challenges. One significant challenge has been the mismatch between what the web was designed for — namely, a network of linked documents — and what we’re using it for — a network of live collaborations. Different learning systems deal with this mismatch in different ways. Some systems stick with the web-native document-oriented model, and support asynchronous (i.e. different time) collaborative interactions around “content”, “educational resources”, or “learning objects”. Other systems support live, synchronous (i.e. same time) collaborative interactions by relying on better-suited network protocols, but do not run within a browser. Finally, a growing class of systems, including Grockit, have chosen to engineer a way to support live user interactions on the Web. For us, the motivation for engineering a solution is to enable you to use Grockit from the comfort of most any web browser on most any computer. If you’ve participated in one of our learning games / study groups, you know how convenient this can be.
But just because the “hard” work is done (read: supporting synchronous interactions on the web) doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to pass on doing the “easier” work (read: supporting asynchronous interactions.) If you’ve spent time reviewing your Grockit study sessions and reading through the explanations and discussion threads, you’d probably agree that this, too, can be quite valuable. Here’s where I think that it gets interesting: If we can support both synchronous and asynchronous interactions among learners, how do we know which to use? Which interactions should to be synchronous? Which should be asynchronous? Which should be a mix? What should that mix be?
There are no clear correct (or incorrect) answers here, so it’s been an interesting challenge trying to figure out what seems to work best. In the paper, I share a few lessons that we’ve learned in the course of grappling with this, including:
- implications of question complexity
- implications of activity visibility
- implications of continuous communication
- implications for discussion repurposing
- implications of group size on discussion dynamics
- implications of community size on group formation
If you’re interested in learning more, you can read the full paper.
