Knowledge building and the metadiscourse concept

I have now published two papers about knowledge building and the metadiscourse/metacommunication concept:

PAPER NR.1

   Expanding the metadiscourse concept in knowledge building.

Some comments from the reviewers:

- Reviewer A: This conceptual paper addresses an important issue regarding the nature of metadiscourse in Knowledge Building. (…)Overall, the paper is well-written and –organized, and it also provides a novel theoretical framework to look at the relationships between metadiscourse and knowledge building activities.

- Reviewer B: The author of this paper made an attempt to clarify and expand the concept of metadiscourse that is important in KBCs. Drawing on discourse examples from two published studies, the author identified several facets of metadiscourse/metacommunication and suggested additional aspects. This attempt is helpful.

PAPER NR.2

   Metadiscourse in Knowledge Building: A question about written or verbal metadiscourse

Some comments from the reviewers:

- Reviewer A: This is a very interesting and much-needed paper that attempts to develop a deeper conceptualization of metadiscourse as it applies to knowledge building practice and research. (…)

- Reviewer B: The work is really interesting to understand how metacommunication can be analyzed in a kb context.

Action research and learning networks in schools in Ontario

The Teacher Learning and Leadership Program
An interesting initiative in Ontario is “the Teacher Learning and Leadership Program” (TLLP) which started in 2007. The government is funding grassroots projects developed by experienced classroom teachers so that their personal knowledge about how to improve one or more aspects of student learning or teacher learning can be developed and shared with their peers. The program has covered 401 projects with 2,400 teachers during the first four years of existence. The Ontario Teachers’ Federation (the umbrella union for over 120,000 teachers) is also involved in the arrangement of conferences for new project participants and they “summit” sessions where project participantes who have finished the one-year action research phase share their learning with other teachers, schools and school boards (Clark, 2012). The goals of the TLLP are:

• to support experienced teachers who undertake self-directed advanced professional development related to improved student learning and development;
• to help classroom teachers develop leadership skills for sharing learning and exemplary practices on a board-wide and/or provincial basis; and to facilitate knowledge exchange.
• to facilitate knowledge exchange by building a provincial network for the sharing of teacher expertise

Positive evaluation

According to Clark (2012) participants have been extremely positive about the experience, and projects have addressed new approaches to all teaching subjects, innovative programs to improve literacy, numeracy or education for students at risk, and action research into improving professional learning communities in schools (Some of the work is documented in Ontario Teachers’ Federation DVD Taking the Lead). Both this program and the New Teacher Induction Program (NTIP) are putting the emphasis on individual professional learning and networking rather than on PD days. Further research should explore if teacher learning is enhanced by the shift away from externally-designed traditional professional development programs to ongoing, collaborative, teacher-selected and job-embedded learning activities (Clark, 2012).

Other countries working in a similiar way

Another similar program  INSTEP (InService Teacher Educator Practice), has been in place in New Zealand since 2004. Accoring to Clark (2012) both this project and the Ontario TLLP program resemble the Japanese “lesson study” and Chinese teachers’ research group approaches that Schwille and Dembele (2007) describe as exemplary teacher-focussed professional learning models. All these programs share some common features:

• they use the teachers’ own classroom as laboratories for professional development.
• they emphasize teachers working together.
• they use target lessons to discuss and investigate broader goals of schooling.
• they rely on action research with teachers writing reports to disseminate their learning.
• they emphasize the need to understand student thinking.
• there is a balance between individual teacher initiative and leadership, and outsider advice and guidance (Schwille and Dembele, 2007: 112–113 in Clark, 2012).

One idea in the future can be to use wiki environments to support this kind of knowledge sharing.


Sources

- Clark, Rosemary (2012). Professional control and professional learning. Some Policy Implications (ed.). Clark, Rosemary;  D. W. Livingstone & Harry John Smaller. Teacher Learning and Power in the Knowledge Society. http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-94-6091-973-2_8.pdf

- Website with more information about the project: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/teacher/tllp.html

The importance of metacommunication

I have just published a paper about The Importance of Metacommunication in Supervision Processes in Higher Education. In this paper I separate between three distinct types of metacommunication:  What, how and when do you metacommunicate.

The "What-dimension" describes what kind of metacommunicative content you are talking about. This can both be the conversational content, the conversational relationship or the use of conversational time.  The "How-dimension" suggests that one will relate to other people in a specific way when metacommunicating. An important distinction is made between monological and dialogical metacommunication, where the last type refers to an episode where both parties are metacommunicating.  The "When-dimension" suggests that a metacommunicative utterance will always take place at a specific time. 

In the context of supervision in higher education,  I recommend that there should be more focus on metacommunication as part of a transparent communication style and metacommunication about the collaboration period in supervision.

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Collaborative writing with wikis

Here is a short summary of the main research project I am currently working with:

Background

Collaborative writing is considered an important activity in a large variety of professional work. Recently, the widespread use of social media has also increased the amount of writing in social interaction. In addition academic collaborative writing projects have emerged. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is especially interesting because of the large amount of contributors from all over the world. The success of this massive online project seems to challenge popular definitions of collaborative writing which have focused on a limited amount of writers (Lowry et al. 2004, Posner and Baecker 1992).

Goal 

Based on these new trends, I will develop a comprehensive model of collaborative writing which attempts to integrate these new writing trends from the internet. Inspired by a sociocultural perspective (Castelló et al. 2012; Prior 2006) and recent theoretical development within the research field CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning)(Järvelä and Hadwin 2013; Kirschner and Erkens 2013), I will establish a multilevel framework that describes writing activities at four different levels: individual, small group, community and massive global scale.

Method

The theoretical discussion will be based on data from a case study in Norwegian teacher education. In the spring term 2012, approximately 25 students were required to use a wiki to do three collaborative writing assignments in a course about educational use of ICT. Students met face-to-face one or two times a week during period of one month. In these evening sessions a rich variety of data was collected: video data, audio data and individual screen capture data. In addition students were interviewed in groups after they had finished their assignments.

In the data analysis I will give a detailed description of how the students collaborated. Discourse data will be used to analyze the interaction and the language use. I will use screen capture data to analyze the evolvement of collective text artifacts during the course. I will also describe the tensions that arise when students write together in new ways which don’t necessarily fit with the cultural expectations of what is considered “good academic writing”.

References

 - Castelló, M., Bañales, G., & Vega, N. A. (2010). Research approaches to the regulation of academic writing: the state of the question. Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology, 8(3), 1253-1282.

 - Järvelä, S., & Hadwin, A. F. (2013). New frontiers: Regulating learning in CSCL. Educational Psychologist, 48(1), 25-39.

 - Kirschner, P. A., & Erkens, G. (2013). Toward a framework for CSCL research. Educational Psychologist, 48(1), 1-8.

 - Lowry, P. B., Curtis, A., & Lowry, M. R. (2004). Building a taxonomy and nomenclature of collaborative writing to improve interdisciplinary research and practice. Journal of Business Communication, 41(1), 66-99.

 - Posner, I. R., & Baecker, R. M. (1992, January). How people write together [groupware]. In System Sciences, 1992. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Hawaii International Conference on (Vol. 4, pp. 127-138). IEEE.

 - Prior, P. (2006). A sociocultural theory of writing. Handbook of writing research, 54-66.

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Collective development of wiki textbooks in teacher education

The last two years, I have been leading a project where we have tried to develop new textbooks in Norwegian Teacher Education through the use of wikis.

We developed two different wiki textbooks (“The Mentor Teacher” and “A guide for music teachers”). Both of these books are of quite high quality and people are currently working on improved versions of the books. We are also translating the book about mentoring into an English version which will hopefully be ready in June 2013. The wiki text permits flexible reuse because of special text license. 

This developmental work is intended to stimulate the development of a more transparent knowledge sharing environment at Østfold University College, but also far beyond this specific institution. This is the reason why it has been important to stimulate the development of sustainable communities that can continue to develop these textbooks. We have encouraged contributions from several different stakeholders such as experienced teacher educators, student teachers and teachers. In this way we try to challenging traditional production of textbooks and the notion of teachers and student teachers as only being “textbook consumers”.

The project is funded by Norway Opening Universities and started in 2011 and continue until spring 2014.

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Balanced literacy diet

Students at the University of Toronto are developing a professional web site about literacy together with their teachers.