General Introductions

Before Finland was on line:

Marlene Scardamalia, Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology:  Curiosity as a phenomenon has taken on a life in the database.  When people reframe problems in terms of something they need to understand, interesting thing come up that you wouldn't have imagined.  That was one of Jim Webb's delights.  I'm wondering if it's true in health care, say, too.  What would happen if we ask people what they're really curious about.

FINLAND

Kai: Interesting discussion in the database on these topics, shows knowledge building, struggling with issues.  Deeper understanding of issues, and examining of presuppositions.  The issues are difficult to discuss in a foreign language, especially because you often don' t have clear ideas before you begin to write.

(A difference between educational and philosophical conferences is that in philosophy, the papers are usually read, because the ideas are too complex.)

So let's take up the challenge, and reflect on what we have learned.

Focus on high points.  Leave some topics for later--postpone the discussion of learning objects because ____ is not here.  And also leave aside the disccussion of social network analysis.

Points to discuss:

1) What does the trialogic approach really look like?

2) What conceptual artifacts really are

3) What are the driving forces of knowledge building?

4) What is the relation between knowlege building and activity theory?

5) Alternative ways to conceptualize cognitive artifacts other than relying on Popper's controversial 3 worlds approach.

Carl: Comparision of knowledge building and activity theory is really a comparison of unlike things.  Activity theory claims, at least, to be a theory. Knowledge building is a phenomenon.  You could have any number of theories, possibly opposing, about knowledge building, one of them being activity theory, perhaps.

Kai: Trialogic approach.  How to make sense of it?  What does it mean?  Seems more complex now that we've had the discussion in the database. ... mediating conceptual and other artifacts socially.

??: Would like to hear more of what everyone thinks of these ideas --mediation and trialogue. 

One root of the idea of trialog is the interrogative mode of inquiry.   The idea in the physical sciences that we are in a dialogue with nature.  In social sciences we

are in a dialog with nature and also with our fellow enquirers.

We need to be understandable to our fellow enquirers and also mesh our ideas with previous ideas.  So it's a trialog--fellow enquirers and nature.

Kai:  From a more pragmatic point of view, in CSCL there is an emerging consensus of a social learning  view of knowledge building and learning, relying perhaps too much on situational cognition, so that the mediating aspect of ideas is not present. It seems too unidimensional.

Carl:  I'm dissatisfied with the idea of asking questions of nature.  There's really not much similarity to asking questions of another person.  With another person, there are to active, interpreting agents involved, and information passes between them.  Nothing like that happens in nature.  Nature doesn't have opinions about anything. So trialog seems to be a good attempt to build a workable theory of this--of exchange between self-organizing systems.

Marlene:  I can't find an explanatory path between the database discussion and cultures of innovation. Neither the the idea of trialog or induction seems to explain.  They seem to start with a culture of innovation. 

Activity theory identifies the components of a model, but isn't an explanatory theory of cultures of innovation.

It's like Hayes and Flower's model of written composition--all the components are accounted for, but it identifies what needs to be described.  Doesn't tell you what's the driving force for evolution within that system.  There's no explanation of how those constructs work.

Kai:  I've been trying to understand collaboration as a self-organizing system.  Trialog and activity theory are ways of understanding self-organizing systems, and make them easier to understand.  Trialogic helps us see phenomena in a more complex way than usual.  It allow us to see video tapes differently than before--we can see students interacting with ideas created by fellow students, rather than just with each other.

We're struggling with multiple meanings of mediation.

???:  I'd like to comment on how you can be in dialog with nature.  If you are doing an experiment, you are asking if things are this way or that way.

Kai:  But that can only answer yes or no questions.

Carl:  Allan Newell wrote a paper called You Can't Play 20 Questions With Nature and Win.   With yes or no questions, you can't get anywhere.

Marlene:  What's the difference between how you analysed the videos from a dialogic or trialogic point of view?  What does trialog give you?

Kai:  For videos of interactions between CSILE students, I can see trialogic interaction.  CSILE students give each other's ideas existence independent from the student.  They can say I agree with you, but I disagree with your theory.  Ideas have an independent existence which the knowledge building theory's proposing.

Carl:  We're all going in the same direction.  We recognize that discussion about an theory is not the same as discussion of the real world to which the theory refers.

Darwins theory vs. evolution itself.  Trialog means bring in the ideas as well as the interaction between people.  We're not, or at least I'm not, declaring that Popper's World 3 is right; just that it's a useful way to see that.

Earl: [It may be a continuum.]? An example from gravity.  It can be treated as an intentional object, when you want to advace the theory.  From a very practical point of view, a carpenter deals with gravity whenever he hammers a nail, but he doesn't need to represent it intentionally.  But the other day, I saw a steam driven pile-driver, and thought that the operator has to know how much steam to give it in any given situation, so he has to represent gravity in a more intentional way than the carpenter.

Marlene:  Examples of ideas from the database.  Each are started with an INTU.  One of the characteristics of a knowledge building culture is that they can generate INTUs, which set forth ideas that can be brought into dialog.  Understanding cultures where more of that happens is where we need explanation.  INTUs seem to preceed trialogic analysis.  Why does a knowledge buliding culture bring more artifacts (INTUs) to the surface?

How do we explain the number of artifacts as opposed to what happens to them after they are created?

Trialog lets you see what happens after the ideas are out there.  How do you create a culture where these objects emerge?

Kai:  We don't know!  In order to have a knowledge building community you need to have an [expansive]? learning community.  Posing questions and such.  You need to develop social practices in the classroom such that everything they're doing advances knowledge building.  As cognitive psychologists, we used to stress the conceptual side of things too much.  We need to bring in culture and activity patterns in the classroom.  So we have to consider relations between social practice and the conceptual side, but to avoid reducing everything to social practice as in social learning.  The trialogic model is a sort of answer to that.

Lasse:  Cultures where nothing new is created--what is the main difference in practice to knowledge building cultures?

Earl:  Communities of practice in math tend to stop knowledge building.  They are aimed at sustaining the existing culture.  What breaks the normal practice?  Knowledge building doesn't have a good way to look at knowledge and practice.

Marlene:  In professional development, pride of being brought into the community of practice is an important motivation, but it's a negative force for becoming a knowledge building community.  The idea of restructuring practice is antagonistic to becoming a member.

Maybe it's the same in health care.

There's a study that asked janitors how they would do things differently if they could.  Their insights were remarkable.  They should be set free from the sanitation department.  We don't let practitioners touch the practice.

Mary:  Maybe that's why we've had success with experienced teachers--Myrna, Jim, and now __  They know the practice, and they are ready to change it.

Blake:  We want practitioners to step outside their culture.

Marlene:  And they can't change it bit by bit within the range of freedom they're given.  It takes a reconstruction.

Margot:  First vs third semester of training.  Early courses are worried about details of whether they're getting what they need.  It's the later courses that thing knowledge forum is magnificent.

Kai:  In a database, what's the driving force for knowledge building?

Mary:  Carl mentioned improvable ideas.  But I think before that is real ideas and authentic problems.  When students can decide what to investigate, that becomes the driving force.  Some may drop out, and others join, but the community as a whole is motivated.

Carl:  Not everything that's good in school is knowledge building.  What I call type 2 curious phenomena (phenomena that are not part of normal experience.)  Driving a nail with a hammer on the moon.  In phsics, these sort of problems are used extensively, and can get quite complex.  What happens if you try to juggle in a free falling elevator.  It's good stuff for science.  Jim Minstrel uses problems of this type a lot, and students offer different ideas, and come to some understanding, and work it out.  But good science isn't knowledge building.  Curious phenomena tend to create that sort of problem. You juggle the concepts you have until it fits.  It's not knowledge building--there's little knowledge building in elementary physics.

Marlene:  I can't help thinking it's the sense that children get of "I just didn't know my ideas could have an effect", could drive knowledge building.  Ideas have a place to live and grow.  Someone is studying gravity, and then someone else is learning to juggle at home, and maybe someone else is studying the moon.  You get to the same problem through a different, real route.  It's not the object it's having a reason to care about the problem. The community allows ideas to live and grow.

Kai:  To what degree is the driving force individual or collective?

Marlene:  Individual ideas have to live in a community.  If they don't live in a community, if no one's interested in them, they die.

Earl:  As a self-organizing system, the emergent phenomena is the knowlege the community generates.  So you don't need individual motives. [?]  It's a group notion.  For individuals, the sense of belonging, sense of ...

??:  What's the relation between explanation and knowledge building?  In knowledge forum all .... of science come from induction.  ... is a driving force.

Marlene:  I think the important thing is the shift from a question and answer framework to a theoretical framework that needs to deal with all the evidence, from everybody, and reach the explanatory coherence of a theoretical framework.  Not explanation of one thing.

Kai:  Moving from abduction to best explanation.

Carl:  Explanation is certainly at the core of all disciplines.  But there are other kinds of conceptual objects as products of knowledge building--designs, procedures, algorithms.  And instructive analogies, which are some of the most interesting products of students.  In more practical settings plans, procedures, programs.  Although even in the most practical enterprise, explanation plays an important role.

Kai:  The question itself is misleading--it presupposes one driving force.  There are many factors.

Kai: Well it's 7:10, how shall we continue after this?  What about the summer institute?\

Marlene:  So far we are planning posters in the wide sense of the term--could be a database view, or anything.  Who's coming?  What do we want to accomplish?

Kai:  Parita and I will be coming, and will have posters to present.  Marianna is doing excellent work with Knowledge Forum.  Has been invited by Nancy Law to Hong Kong.  Could do a virtual workshop with her from Finland at the summer institute.  Maybe visit her class.

Ann:  Is Engstrom coming? I would like to have a workshop on activity theory.

Kai: Don't know.

Marlene: We could have a virtual conference, maybe get him to look at a database.

Stefano:  Interested in a workshop on activity theory.  Activities that lead to transformations of reality.  At OISE, I say the activity around the question of  how to build a skyscraper that can withstand an earthquake.  Seems to be a question that requires a reorganization of knowledge to face a new problem.  So activity theory seems very useful to interpret knowledge building phenomena. 

Kai:  Parita has been in touch with [some group?].  They could participate in a video meeting, and my group here too, would like to participate.

Marlene:  Having that as an event would be good.  Can we find out quickly if it's possible?  Jim Hewitt has also used activity theory to analyse a database.

Kai:  I'll check today.

Stefano:  Another way to define a good question for knowledge building is a question that can [reorganize?] a schema.  Or a question that can enter a new zone of proximal development.  Maybe activity theory can define which kinds of question can reorient knowledge building activity.