 |
|
“Big
Ideas Tool” as a New Feature of Knowledge Forum Bodong Chen, Maria Chuy, Monica Resendes, & Marlene Scardamalia |
|
ABSTRACT Foundational to Knowledge Building pedagogy is the view that ideas ought to be at the centre of educational endeavours and continually improved through a social process, with members sharing responsibility for advancing not just individual but group knowledge. This objective has informed the design of Knowledge Forum, software that supports the pedagogy and the process of knowledge creation. Current features in Knowledge Forum, such as theory-building scaffolds and rise-above notes and views have produced strong educational results and allowed us to identify levels of competence young students are capable of but that are obscured by traditional learning environments and not revealed by current assessments. The current tool aims to uncover yet another layer of competence—students’ ability to identify big ideas in texts. Toward this end, we are working on the development of a new "Big Ideas tool." By organically integrating various functionalities such as highlighting, tagging, and visualizing ideas, this tool is designed to help enable students to advance the frontiers of their knowledge by identifying and evaluating the community's best ideas, linking promising ideas with external resources and, finally, assessing their “improvement progress.” Link to final poster Link to the Big Ideas Tool in Knowledge Forum movie |
|