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Opening statement by Therese Laferriere

• Collaborative learning/knowledge building in synchronous/asnchronous, verbal and written forms was at the heart of the design of the remote networked school (RNS) in Francophone Quebec, Canada.

• The RNS initiative (2002-2010) now spread to over 100 small rural schools, and 23 school districts have adopted the model. The raison d’etre of the initiative was to enrich the learning environment of rural small schools as an alternative to closing them because of demographic changes. Participatory design is a must but some top-down decisions are taken.

• Knowledge Forum and iVisit are the basic collaborative tools, and data is collected on each of the servers dedicated to these tools.

• Idea improvement, which is at the center of Bereiter and Scardamalia’s perspective on collaborative knowledge building, is emphasized during onsite/online teacher professional development activities. However, Knowledge Forum (KF) basic functionalities are taught before the 12 knowledge building principles. The use of KF advanced functionalities are taught as the research-intervention team refers to the knowledge building principles.

• The research-intervention team is present online during and after classtime, and respond to various queries. As the year progresses, queries become more pedagogically-focused.

• Classroom-based learning/knowledge building (Francophone) artefacts are available at http://www.eer.qc.ca/projets/∞

• It is our understanding that for classroom-based collaborative learning and knowledge building to sustain and scale, a number of actors need to take action at the different levels of a specific educational system.

Translations∞

Opening statement by Elizabeth Charles

There are many challenges to designing collaborative knowledge building
activities for college level physics. In this session I will present two
examples of a model we have developed that has successfully promoted
students’ engagement in online conversations (chats & conferences), which
has helped to deepen their understanding physics concepts. More
importantly, this model demonstrates collaborative work involving the
improvement of sophisticated ideas. I will discuss these essay∞, custom essays∞, Bing Search engine∞ cases in light of
what they tell us about the practical nature of implementing knowledge
building in higher education.
My thinking on the "model" is a systemic one that includes the situation
(the preceding classroom work), which helps to ground the online activity.
Thus there are Dissertation∞ activity specific cultural artifacts for students to draw
on as they improve their ideas (data, collective memories, etc.).

Opening statement by Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld

Opening statement by Tak-Wai Chan

The Two-Sigma Problem of One-to-One Classes

The upsurge of the low cost laptop market signals the advent of one-to-one (1:1) classrooms – classrooms where Essay∞ every student uses at least one wireless-enabled computing device for learning. How do we prove that 1:1 classes are beneficial for the students and Thesis∞ the teacher? What is our research assignment∞ goal, in terms of the pressing and very hard problem of classroom technology adoption in schools, as indicated by many studies (Paley, 2007; NSF Cyber-Learning Report, 2008)?

Most research on technology supported classroom claims learning improvement. But the majority of such research, I speculate, incurs burden on the teacher. A significant increase of academic achievement and a significant decrease of teacher loading, therefore, are at least two necessary conditions, if not the crux, for the success of technology adoption in classrooms. To address these two conditions, I define:

1:1 Productivity = Student Final Achievement Measurement / Teacher Loading

Raising productivity is the primary reason for many technology inventions, so is for classroom technology. From the above definition, the higher student final achievement measurement is, and the lower the teacher loading is, the higher the teacher productivity will be. The teacher, however, usually will not cut down on their loading, even though their role changes in the 1:1 classroom.

Now, what is our research goal? The work of Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues (1984) hints a ringing goal. When comparing the final achievement measurement of the conventional classes learning the subject matter with about 30 students per teacher with that of the experimental classes adopting mastery learning and one-to-one human tutoring, they found that the experimental classes outperformed the conventional ones by two-sigma: The average student in the experimental classes was above 98% of the students in the conventional classes. Their experiment was conducted over 3-week block of time.

The 2-sigma productivity problem of 1:1 classes is defined to be the same as the Bloom’s, except the inclusion of a condition: The teacher loading cannot exceed that of a conventional class. That is, without additional teacher loading, the final achievement of the 1:1 class outperforms that of the conventional class by 2-sigma. This measurement goal induces a series of benchmarks for advancement, starting from, say, 0.6-sigma, then 0.8-sigma, 1-sigma, 1.2-sigma, and so forth, until reaching to 2-sigma. Note that for teacher loading, it is not clear how to measure. For rigorous measurement of student achievement and teacher loading, experimental period should substantially exceed 3 weeks, the period of Bloom’s experiment.

In this session, I’ll briefly discuss some issues and difficulties of our initial effort in tackling this problem for elementary classes learning math and language art, for example, issue mindset versus system mindset. Also, learning ownership seems to be a noticeable consideration in designing 1:1 classroom activities. Three classes of collaborative learning, from this learning ownership perspective, seem to be appropriate for 1:1 classes.


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