Communication dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments

http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/farmer.htmlJames Farmer

“I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself”. (Dewey 1897, p. 77)

Aquesta cita cobra tot el sentit i modernitat, 110 anys després, en el context tecnològic actual.

“…only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’ thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. (Freire 1970)
Derek Powazek in Design for Community (2002) describes how different tools promote different forms of interaction on the Web and in particular how these tools are situated (for example, behind administratively controlled authentication systems or controlled through karma points) impacts dramatically on the kind of interactions that take place within them.
…the focus has tended to be on what can be achieved through particular technologies rather than what it is that these technologies themselves can facilitate.

NOTA: un idea molt important a tenir en compte, reflexionar sempre sobre què volem aconseguir amb la tecnologia, més que agafar-la en funció de què fa o què no fa.

Comunities of inquiry
http://communitiesofinquiry.com/

Social presence is defined by Garrison, Anderson and Archer as “the ability of participants in a community of inquiry to project themselves socially and emotionally, as “real” people (i.e. their full personality), through the medium of communication being used” (2000 p. 94).
Cognitive presence: Garrison, Anderson and Archer describe cognitive presence as “the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry”
Teaching presence: Anderson et al. (2001) view teaching presence as “the design, facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realising personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes”.

Discussion boards in online learning environments
Both these major OLEs use a discussion board format as their primary communication tool and these tools are in functionality (if not in appearance) very similar.

Both provide a synchronous communication tool, functionality to allow teachers to post announcements to students and an internal messaging component similar to email but significantly often unable to be forwarded to users email accounts.

Limitations of discussion boards in facilitating communities of inquiry
Many support sites and community areas use discussion boards for particular issues or questions, notifying users of responses to their queries through email or syndication, and the threaded message discussion board format is often used (with or without email or syndication) in comments functions on weblogs (e.g. Farmer, Levine), in online publications (Guarak et al. 2004) and some online popular media (e.g. Slashdot). However, as previously discussed, major OLEs use very similar discussion board tools containing particular key features and it is these features which facilitate and sometimes require a particular kind of behaviour from teachers and students alike, encouraging certain types of communication and discouraging others. Once the user has entered the discussion board environment, these communication features essentially allow users to read previous messages (by either clicking on a title or expanding a number of messages from just their title), post a new message to a discussion board and post a reply to a previous message (in this case forming or contributing to a thread).

In terms of social presence this kind of discussion board could be seen to offer little opportunity for users to “project themselves socially and emotionally, as ‘real’ people” (Garrison & Anderson 2003)

…it is worthwhile to note the increasing use of detailed signatures on discussion board postings around the Web as this is arguably due to the need, as seen by users, to project and convey themselves as real people (the signature may contain a picture, a link to a personal website, a quote or any other identifying characteristic) and in this sense demonstrates the inadequacies of the traditional discussion board model in the same ways that the emergence of emoticons has demonstrated the inadequacies of text based email.

NOTA: en els fòrums, l’ús d’una signatura personalitzada i els emoticons, són exemples de les mancances del sistema, amb limitades possibilitats de projecció personal.

Cognitive presence: This is not dissimilar to entering a room that may or may not be frequented by the people you wish to communicate with (who will, in either case, be invisible to the user), leaving a message on the table and then returning each day to see if someone has responded to the communication. Likewise, any person responding to the message would have to visit the room each day to see if the writer or anyone else has replied to it. The room may be one of many rooms (there are frequently numerous discussion boards used in a single course) and there may be little or no reason other than to check for messages or responses that a person may have to visit it. After several days of this kind of discussion it is likely in many cases that a user will visit the room less, if at all.
NOTA: no és fàcil seguir converses en un fòrum, ja que són a llarg plaç, i cal estar pendent de si et responen o no(ja sigui entrant al fòrum o rebent avisos per email) i encara més quan es segueix més d’un fòrum.
Discussion boards have frequently been used successfully as communication tools in online learning environments (Rovai 2002, Bradshaw & Hinton 2004, Berner 2003) and hence it is inaccurate to argue that effective educational outcomes, in the form of communities of inquiry, cannot be achieved using these tools. However, while other online tools are available which facilitate different forms of communication, and while these are entirely unavailable in these dominant OLEs, it is important to examine how these could be used in similar contexts, especially, if as with weblogs, these technologies can appear to offer much in facilitating, through online communication, the effective development of a community of inquiry.

Weblogs in facilitating communities of inquiry
A widely accepted definition of what exactly constitutes a weblog is “a website which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage”

Frequently add to a weblog through simple web publishing technology
These collaborative efforts are uncommon and often operated in a manner which befits their large audience, and as such are much more often tilted towards broadcast (which then sparks discussion) rather than dialogue between the author and readers.

… in the academic and professional sphere the personal nature of weblogs has been instrumental in the extensive development of use as personal online research and knowledge management tools (Paquet 2002, Fielder 2003), and as an ever evolving e-portfolio and representation of the publisher to their context. In essence weblogs allow an individual to simply publish, organise and develop knowledge in their own online space.

Publish items uniquely by time and date of publishing
Items published to a weblog may range from text to images to video or audio as the nature of the web environment and the ease of publishing allows for all of these. Crucially, whatever the format, when each item is published it is given an individual URL either relating to that specific item or the time period (most often the day) in which it was published. This allows for a reader (or listener or viewer) to record for themselves, or cite or refer other readers to that specific posting. This method of citing specific posts, along with the development of blogrolls (a displayed list of links to weblogs the publisher relates to in some way) is a significant aspect in the development of the blogosphere and particular blogospheres (Bloom 2003) and is made significant use of in the development of tools such as trackback as described below.

Attach to items the facility for comments to be added and for postings elsewhere that have linked to that item to be tracked back
Each item is posted under a dedicated and specific URL it can have a number of different applications automatically applied to it; these have included automated searches for the subject matter on a search engine, the facility to email the item to another person and perhaps most importantly, the ability to comment on or discuss the item using a tool similar to a discussion board and trackback any other items on the web that have linked to that specific item.

This comments facility tool allows for what has been seen by some to be more ad hoc discussion and comment on the items in a particular post.

NOTA: permet un feedback més contextualitzat I ad hoc per part del professorat.
Publish with each new posting a webfeed such as RSS or Atom
allow other individuals to subscribe through an aggregator or similar application to receive either full or in part any new items posted to that weblog.

Weblogs facilitating communities of inquiry
Many popular weblogs, for example, have no comments facilities as they frequently attract vigorous debate and often, especially with political subjects, a degree of abuse.

However, on the whole and at the time of writing, the features supplied by the major weblog providers allow the user to communicate in the manner described above and hence an examination of the degree to which this medium can effectively facilitate the successful formation of a community of inquiry can be prefaced by an assumption of these fundamental capabilities.

In terms of establishing social presence it can be argued that weblogs offer a significant opportunity for users to project themselves as “real” people.

There are a wide range of templates available with every provider) and developing on their previous postings from the online persona they have developed. Indeed, the fact that the blogger is also able to retain ownership of their writing, edit at will, refer to previous items and ideas, and control in its entirety the space and manner in which the weblog is published, can significantly augment their control over their expression and hence increase the opportunity to project and the motivation for doing so.

While the primary tool of communication in weblogs is text, users are equally able to “photoblog”, “audioblog” or “videoblog” their entries and all of these kinds of projections are made to an audience that the blogger may well be largely aware of through currently evolving tools indicating subscribers to webfeeds as well as their hyperlinked “blogosphere”. Hence the blogger is able to express themselves through multiple media and assess (valorar), at the least, their immediate audience and, to an extent, their wider readership.

NOTA: Parlant amb en Miquel Duran, veiem que si tothom fa servir agregadors RSS, el disseny d’un blog, (la publicitat, etc.) passa inadvertida i per tant aquest fet diferencial (plantilla personalitzada, etc.) que defensa Farmer de projecció personal també es redueix.

Weblogs undoubtedly support sustained discourse as evidenced by the development and spread of memes and the ever developing nature of the blogosphere (Bloom 2003), but a question asked by many engaging with the technology is the extent to which this discourse is reflective, critical and purposeful. While, for example, this kind of discourse is not apparent in the majority of weblogging systems developed largely for socialising among teenagers, the charge that this invalidates the medium is inappropriate due to the breadth of use of weblogging.

A weblog is a reflective medium, and the nature of publishing to an audience in a manner that will be archived, can be referred to and for which the author maintains responsibility and ownership has developed a certain style of expression. Certain research (Herring et al, 2004) across the blogging spectrum has indicated that there is a possibility that weblogs encourage significantly more in depth and extended writing than communication by email or through discussion board environments and yet less extensive than more formal modes of publication, producing in an academic sense a kind of discourse somewhere between the conversational and the article.

It could be argued that in terms of facilitating effective teacher presence, weblogs are even less potent than discussion boards in their ability to empower the teacher to design, facilitate or direct cognitive and social processes towards valuable educational outcomes.

This argument can be based on the premise that a teachers weblog is essentially entirely separate to a learners weblog and the learner under no compulsion to read the teachers weblog. However, Clay Shirky observed in his essay “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality” (2003) that invariably, weblogs fall into a “balance of inequality” in the same way that any system does if allowed “the very act of choosing” which “spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution”. Effective use of a weblog by a teacher arguably places them as an organic central node to the class, and given the simplicity with which students would be able to aggregate their webfeed and the selective “push” nature of this kind of aggregation - where webfeeds are, despite being “pulled” by the users aggregator, apparent to the end user as a pushed form of communication in much the same way as email - it is far more likely that the teacher will be able to facilitate and direct cognitive and social processes.
one of the key attributes of weblogs is that they have within them “incorporated subversion” (Squires 1999) which allows learners to express themselves and explore their context in ways independent of the original designers intentions.

Conclusions:
if the discussion board tool, which forms the basis of asynchronous online communication in both systems, is examined as to the degree to which it is able to facilitate the development of effective social, cognitive and teacher presence, serious doubts are raised about its suitability. Under similar examination, weblog technology can be theoretically seen to more effectively meet the needs of educators seeking to establish a community inquiry online. Consequently, while discussion boards may have a role to play in the shaping of future OLEs it is arguable that this role should be complemented by the implementation, within or alongside these systems, of weblogging functionality.