CSCL 2007

Creativity, Collaboration and Competence: Agency in online

synchronous chat environments

Elizabeth Charles & Wes ShumarDawson College, Montreal, QC & Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA

What does Agency have to do with CSCL?

creativity

collaborationcompetence

Agency as “creativity”

• Structural constraints & agency (Giddens, 1979; 1984)– Structure: patterns of practice involved in

human action (e.g., the production of meaning)

– Group structure may constrain action or promote agency

• Creativity, image, identity (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998)– Production of new culture the process of

cultural change

Agency as collaboration

• Epistemic agency (Scardamalia, 2000) – willingness (initiative) to present ideas & negotiate fit

between personal knowledge and those of others

• Holland et al. (1998) – Improvisational acts - actions influenced by

awareness of perceived needs – Self-directed symbolization - creation of “figured

worlds”

• Agency as way to contribute to common ground (Greeno, 2005)

• Agency as collective enterprise (Charles & Kolodner, submitted)

Agency as competence

• Bandura’s (2001) four components of agency - Intentionality- Forethought- Self-regulation- Self-efficacy

How can we view Agency?

• Agency as a unifying construct to bring together different perspective related to learning and knowledge work in CSCL environments

• Agency as an individual and collective expression

• Agency as episodic

• Sustained agency as goal

Setting is VMT

• Virtual Math Teams (VMT) is an online service (part of Math Forum) which allows small groups of students the opportunity to work together synchronously with the goal of promoting knowledge building through math discourse

Research Question

• Can we characterize the kinds of things that could be identified as agentic activity?

• Can we identify moments where agency is thwarted?

• Is there something we can do to promote agentic activity and reduce moments where agentic activity is thwarted?

Methodology

• Finding a way into the data requires moving between fine-grain analysis (e.g., conversation analysis) and large-grain analysis (e.g., ethnography)

• Methods we developed:– Ethno-reviewing of data– Selection of snippets– Fine-grained analysis of snippets

Data analysis

• Case Story 1 - shifting consciousness- willingness to collaborate (contribute)- distributed competencies

• Case Story 2 - transforming the activity changing the discourse- unsupported creativity

Case Story 1 data

• CSCL agency presentation/agency excerpt_teamBsess2.htm

Case Story 2 Data

• CSCL agency presentation/agency expert_teamG5.htm

What it might look like if graphedagentic level case story 1

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agentic level

agentic level case story 2

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Conclusion• Case Story 1 - characterized as agentic

- Mutual accountability - all students take up VMT’s call to define new problems

- Students take up “roles” that allow productive work- Awareness of other distributed - effort to maintain

common ground• Case Story 2 - agency as thwarted

- Students gets trapped in normative ideology

- Individual accountability - part of the group tries to define new problem- other part of the group calls them back to simpler problem

- Students take on similar roles- Awareness of other not distributed - lack of common

ground

Implications for VMT design

• Cognitive, social, cultural resources need to be brought into VMT from external sources- structural constraints from outside are

imposed by the kids when there are not sufficient resources

Implications for CSCL

• Open ended questions release constraints allowing improvisation and promoting creativity in problem solving

• Persistence of chat logs and artifacts promote common ground and sustained agency

• Persistence of modeled agentic actions promote taking up of agentic actions by bystanders

AcknowledgementsThe Virtual Math Teams Project is a collaborative effort at Drexel University. The Principal Investigators are Gerry Stahl, Stephen Weimar and Wesley Shumar.

Math Forum staff working on the project: Stephen Weimar, Annie Fetter and Ian Underwood.

Graduate research assistants: Murat Cakir, Johann Sarmiento, Ramon Toledo and Nan Zhou. Alan Zemel is a post-doc.

Visiting researchers have spent 3 to 6 months on the project: Jan-Willem Strijbos (Netherlands), Fatos Xhafa (Spain), Stefan Trausan-Matu (Romania), Martin Wessner (Germany), Elizabeth Charles (Canada).

The ConcertChat software was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute IPSI in Darmstadt, Germany, by Martin Wessner, Martin Mühlpfordt and colleagues.

The VMT project is supported by grants from the NSDL, IERI and SoL programs of the US National Science Foundation. The perspectives expressed in this paper are those of the authors, not necessarily NSF or others.