From the perspective of systems thinking, we can view a classroom as a system: composed of dynamic units or actors, autonomous, and part of a larger system. A system also gets inputs. For an actively engaged and knowledge building classroom, what initial inputs or preparation is necessary? In addition to a certain level of maturity and prior knowledge, does this system require some initial "knowledge transfer" from a teacher, mentor, or supervisor? What form does this come in (e.g. establishing rules, providing effective reading or learning tips, teaching a certain amount of background theory, and so on)? What do you think? Any concrete examples of initial preparation, inputs, or direct transfers in your face-to-face or online classes, or at the institutions you have studied or worked in, that helped achieve heutagogy and knowledge building?
Ed Hirsch argued years ago that education should be based on and also needs to focus on cultural literacy. Cultural literacy begins in the home when parents and caregivers read stories and share information with children, and the process continues in school. For Hirsch, the primary focus of cultural literacy was broadly based on historical events and figures, as well as on literary works, which together would function to provide a shared body of knowledge that serves to weave the social fabric. Rules of appropriate social behavior are another major part of cultural literacy.
Hirsch's work was soundly criticized as being racist on the grounds that it focused on Western historical events and Western literature and for failing to celebrate the fact that different cultures have divergent views of what constitutes appropriate social behavior. The multicultural movement of the 1980s and 1990s ensured that few of his ideas were implemented in our schools.
Hi James, That makes sense. For heutagogy and knowledge building to become more effective, social skills, literacy skills, and communication skills may act as inputs or prerequisites. These are some of the things we can foster in our students as we expect them to become more independent, work with each other, and learn together. In one of our courses that has a major group project, we do a team building session early in the course. Although we expect them to bring a sufficient level of literacy and communication from their high school education;.. in higher education, we can still continue to inform our students and continue to help them become better learners.
I think there are two seminal works in this area. The first is Situated Learning by Lave and Wenger. Essentially it posits that to be, for example, a mathematician you need to become a member of the mathematical community. That is a whole lot more than knowing how to add up. It is about thinking like a mathematician. Mathematicians, scientists and engineers have many things in common, but there are also subtle differences which distinguish one community from the other at the cognitive and problem solving levels.. Lave and Wenger show that to become a member of a community is an apprenticeship process where the student starts at the periphery of the group, but through participation in community activities they gradually move to becoming a fully paid up member.
A very important thing about this, is the community changes as a result of "new blood". The process of change is not one way.
The history of mathematics illustrates how each generation embraces the past, but moves the community to a different cognitive spaces. Cantor's work on set theory was considered by many of his predecessors to be heresy. But his work is now recognised as foundational,
The other work that is critical is the of Professor Stuart Hall from the Open University in the UK. He shows that the Circuit of Culture has 5 interacting elements: representation (e.g. a book), consumption (reading), regulation (don't plagiarise), identity (I am a writer) and production (writing). To become a member of a community requires involvement in the circle.
When I first read Ed Hirsch I threw the book across the room. It was very bad. Years later I read it, And I realised that what Hirsch was saying was to become a participant in aspects of society like government, executive management, etc. required person to be a member of that community, whose cultural characteristics he "defined". It showed that people from minority cultures had immense barriers to overcome if they wanted to join this "elite" Simply put, the culture of minorities is in general not the culture of power. Ergo minorities have more work to do if they want to make that transformation.
As a 1950s West Indian immigrant into the UK, Stuart Hall was the embodiment of someone whose starting point was a long way from academia in the white universities of Britain. Nevertheless he succeeded. He certainly became every inch an academic. But he also transformed academia, pioneering the way for black participation.
Viewed through a systems perspective, knowledge building is an attractor state created by a series of constraints on the system. Scardamalia (2002-full reference below) has identified 12 knowledge building principles that provide the constraints that guide the class into a knowledge building attractor. I should add that Scardamalia and Bereiter consider that the presence of appropriate technologies greatly facilitates knowledge building.
The 12 knowledge building principles are: (Block quote)
REAL IDEAS, AUTHENTIC PROBLEMS Socio-cognitive dynamics: Knowledge problems arise from efforts to understand the world. Ideas produced or appropriated are as real as things touched and felt. Problems are ones that learners really care about—usually very different from textbook problems and puzzles.
Technological dynamics: Knowledge Forum creates a culture for creative work with ideas. Notes and views serve as direct reflections of the core work of the organization and of the ideas of its creators.
IMPROVABLE IDEAS Socio-cognitive dynamics: All ideas are treated as improvable. Participants work continuously to improve the quality, coherence, and utility of ideas. For such work to prosper, the culture must be one of psychological safety, so that people feel safe in taking risks—revealing ignorance, voicing half-baked notions, giving and receiving criticism.
Technological dynamics: Knowledge Forum supports recursion in all aspects of its design—there is always a higher level, there is always opportunity to revise. Background operations reflect change: continual improvement, revision, theory refinement.
IDEA DIVERSITY Socio-cognitive dynamics: Idea diversity is essential to the development of knowledge advancement, just as biodiversity is essential to the success of an ecosystem. To understand an idea is to understand the ideas that surround it, including those that stand in contrast to it. Idea diversity creates a rich environment for ideas to evolve into new and more refined forms.
Technological dynamics: Bulletin boards, discussion forums, and so forth, provide opportunities for diversity of ideas but they only weakly support interaction 10 of ideas. In Knowledge Forum, facilities for linking ideas and for bringing different combinations of ideas together in different notes and views promote the interaction that makes productive use of diversity.
RISE ABOVE Socio-cognitive dynamics: Creative knowledge building entails working toward more inclusive principles and higher-level formulations of problems. It means learning to work with diversity, complexity and messiness, and out of that achieve new syntheses. By moving to higher planes of understanding knowledge builders transcend trivialities and oversimplifications and move beyond current best practices.
Technological dynamics: In expert knowledge building teams, as in Knowledge Forum, conditions to which people adapt change as a result of the successes of other people in the environment. Adapting means adapting to a progressive set of conditions that keep raising the bar. Rise-above notes and views support unlimited embedding of ideas in increasingly advanced structures, and support emergent rather than fixed goals.
EPISTEMIC AGENCY Socio-cognitive dynamics: Participants set forth their ideas and negotiate a fit between personal ideas and ideas of others, using contrasts to spark and sustain knowledge advancement rather than depending on others to chart that course for them. They deal with problems of goals, motivation, evaluation, and long-range planning that are normally left to teachers or managers.
Technological dynamics: Knowledge Forum provides support for theory construction and refinement and for viewing ideas in the context of related but different ideas. Scaffolds for high level knowledge processes are reflected in the use and variety of epistemological terms (such as conjecture, wonder, hypothesize, and so forth), and in the corresponding growth in conceptual content.
COMMUNITY KNOWLEDGE, COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY Socio-cognitive dynamics: Contributions to shared, top-level goals of the organization are prized and rewarded as much as individual achievements. Team members produce ideas of value to others and share responsibility for the overall advancement of knowledge in the community.
Technological dynamics: Knowledge Forum's open, collaborative workspace holds conceptual artifacts that are contributed by community members. Community membership is defined in terms of reading and building-on the notes of others, ensuring that views are informative and helpful for the community, linking views in ways that demonstrate view interrelationships. More generally, effectiveness of the community is gauged by the extent to which all participants share responsibility for the highest levels of the organization's knowledge work.
DEMOCRATIZING KNOWLEDGE Socio-cognitive dynamics: All participants are legitimate contributors to the shared goals of the community; all take pride in knowledge advances achieved by the group. The diversity and divisional differences represented in any organization do not lead to separations along knowledge have/have-not or innovator/non-innovator lines. All are empowered to engage in knowledge innovation.
Technological dynamics: There is a way into the central knowledge space for all participants; analytic tools allow participants to assess evenness of contributions and other indicators of the extent to which all members do their part in a joint enterprise.
SYMMETRIC KNOWLEDGE ADVANCEMENT Socio-cognitive dynamics: Expertise is distributed within and between communities. Symmetry in knowledge advancement results from knowledge exchange and from the fact that to give knowledge is to get knowledge.
Technological dynamics: Knowledge Forum supports virtual visits and the co- construction of views across teams, both within and between communities. Extended communities serve to embed ideas in increasingly broad social contexts. Symmetry in knowledge work is directly reflected in the flow and reworking of information across views and databases of different teams and communities. PERVASIVE KNOWLEDGE BUILDING Socio-cognitive dynamics: Knowledge building is not confined to particular occasions or subjects but pervades mental life—in and out of school. Technological dynamics: Knowledge Forum encourages knowledge building as the central and guiding force of the community's mission, not as an add-on. Contributions to collective resources reflect all aspects of knowledge work
CONSTRUCTIVE USES OF AUTHORITATIVE SOURCES Socio-cognitive dynamics: To know a discipline is to be in touch with the present state and growing edge of knowledge in the field. This requires respect and understanding of authoritative sources, combined with a critical stance toward them. Technological dynamics: Knowledge Forum encourages participants to use authoritative sources, along with other information sources, as data for their own knowledge building and idea-improving processes. Participants are encouraged to contribute new information to central resources, to reference and build-on authoritative sources; bibliographies are generated automatically from referenced resources. KNOWLEDGE BUILDING DISCOURSE Socio-cognitive dynamics: The discourse of knowledge building communities results in more than the sharing of knowledge; the knowledge itself is refined and 12 transformed through the discursive practices of the community—practices that have the advancement of knowledge as their explicit goal.
Technological dynamics: Knowledge Forum supports rich intertextual and inter- team notes and views and emergent rather than predetermined goals and workspaces. Revision, reference, and annotation further encourage participants to identify shared problems and gaps in understanding and to advance understanding beyond the level of the most knowledgeable individual.
EMBEDDED AND TRANSFORMATIVE ASSESSMENT Socio-cognitive dynamics: Assessment is part of the effort to advance knowledge—it is used to identify problems as the work proceeds and is embedded in the day-to-day workings of the organization. The community engages in its own internal assessment, which is both more fine-tuned and rigorous than external assessment, and serves to ensure that the community’s work will exceed the expectations of external assessors
Technological dynamics: Standards and benchmarks are objects of discourse in Knowledge Forum, to be annotated, built on, and risen above. Increases in literacy, twenty-first-century skills, and productivity are by-products of mainline knowledge work, and advance in parallel.
(End block quote)
References:
General to knowledge building:
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge Building. In J. W. Guthrie (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Education, Second Edition (pp. 1370-1373). New York: Macmillan Reference, USA.
Specific to the 12 knowledge building principles:
Scardamalia, M. (2002). Collective Cognitive Responsibility for the Advancement of Knowledge [Electronic Edition]. In B. Smith (Ed.), Liberal education in a knowledge society (pp. 1-26). Chicago: Open Court.
It is a good question, but not formally framed. To begin with a set of basic knowledge management (KM) processes can be put in place. These processes are: acquisition, storage, and dissemination of knowledge. Some researchers propose assimilation of knowledge also as one of the basic KM processes. Take an example of a teacher teaching a particular course for quite some time. He must have come across a numner of questions students would have asked him in the course of his teaching over the years and / or teacher would have asked students questions in the course of teaching to ensure whether students have understood the underlying concepts in the course. This is how questions bank (knowledge) is acquired over a period of time. Answer to these questions can also be included here. Teacher may store these questions in a database / knowledge base. Teacher may classify these questions into some catagories and check if the set of questions are complete with espect to some framework. Teacher may share these questions among students and this completes the dissemination process. The students may be asked to develop answer to these questions and the answers again can be stored in the database and KM cycle goes on. This is just one example how knowledge can be acquired, stored and distributed in a classroom setting.
Knowledge management and knowledge building are not the same process. It happens that there are decent Wikipedia articles about them that clarifies this. See:
Knowledge management vs. Knowledge Building
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_building
Can I suggest the attached article on the impact of assessment systems on learning beliefs. It may be relevant.
http://research.acer.edu.au/aer/12/
Hi Mark, Thanks for the article. The 'systems thinking' is there, in terms of taking into account a variety of interrelated factors, accommodating more autonomous and flexible ways of learning, and trying to better understand the inputs and the outcomes involved. The web site also appears to have many other interesting articles on education. Plus, it is nice to see some potential publishing opportunities with ACER...
Emre
When Considering similar questions in the past, I have found this article helpful:
Hung David & T. Victor (2002) Learning within the Context of Communities of Practices: A Re-Conceptualization of Tools, Rules and Roles of the Activity System, Educational Media International, 39:3-4, 247-255, DOI: 10.1080/09523980210166468
there is a link to the file, but it may not be open access...not sure as I'm accessing from within my institution
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09523980210166468
For those who may not be familiar with the concept of the activity system, Cole & Engeström's 1993 article "A cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition" has a good explanation of it.
Cole, M., & Engeström, Y. (1993). A cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions. Psychological and educational considerations. (pp. 1-46). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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