The Vicarious Learner: Helping Students "Listen In" To Learn.

This paper focuses on the Vicarious Learner project, at Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) that is looking at issues concerning the role of dialogue in learning. Efforts to understand how the value of dialogue in learning depends on the structure of the environment in which it takes place are discussed. The paper begins with a description of the concept of "tertiary courseware" or "vicarious resources," i.e., courseware that contains structures to support discussion among learners and tutors and to capture these dialogues in order to make them reusable for the next group of students. Problems encountered when trying to generate such material are presented, along with some of the solutions being investigated. Also presented are tasks with which to structure and focus dialogues more effectively than generally happens in many seminar or bulletin board discussions. The use of a series of Task Directed Discussion games (TDDs) that demand increasingly deeper thinking about the domain to ease the students into discussions is highlighted. It is concluded that the TDD approach has worked for generating better discussions and hence better vicarious learning material. (Contains 14 references.) (AEF) ******************************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * ******************************************************************************** U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) X? This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. The Vicarious Learner: Helping Students 'Listen In' to Learn Jean McKendree and John Lee Human Communication Research Centre University of Edinburgh Finbar Dineen and Terry Mayes Centre for Teaching and Learning Innovation Glasgow Caledonian University "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS, BEEN GRANTED BY C.H. Olgren TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC). " Introduction Increasingly, the role of dialogue in education is becoming a major research issue in both education and psychology. While the importance of dialogue for learning has been noted by many researchers (Hicks, 1996; Laurillard, 1993; Ohlsson, 1995; Voss, 1996), increasing class sizes and the move toward computer-based courses threatens this component with the danger of disappearing completely. We believe that the role of technology must be to push back the threshold imposed by these constraints, this being achieved by opening up new media for dialogues that are not subject to the same delivery bottlenecks as traditional methods (OECD, 1996). The present paper describes our attempts to understand how the value of dialogue in learning depends on the structure of the environment in which it takes place. We first describe the concept of 'tertiary courseware' or 'vicarious resources'. We shall present some of the problems we encountered trying to generate such material and some of the solutions we are investigating. In particular, we present tasks with which to structure and focus dialogues more effectively than generally happens in many seminar or bulletin board discussions. Finally, we will briefly describe the system we have developed with which to deliver our courses and to research the effectiveness of tertiary courseware. The Vicarious Learning Concept The Vicarious Learner project at Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Edinburgh is looking broadly at issues concerning the role of dialogue in learning. A specific interest, and the origin of the project name, is in the question of whether educational dialogues can be helpfully "re-used" by offering them to other learners who arrive at a problem similar to one addressed in the dialogue (McKendree et al., 1998). We believe this could be a vital element in learningthe observation of peers as learners, the vicarious learning experience. What benefits can students gain from dialogue as observers, not just as participants? Can these benefits be maintained for learners at a distance? Here it is important to draw some distinctions about courseware, and to show how different kinds of support will imply different kinds of technology. "Courseware" is often interpreted to mean the content in a domain, basically like a textbook. This is what we call primary courseware and it encompasses many approachestext, hypertext, multimedia, most Web material. The Vicarious Learner + 249 Secondary courseware comprises tools which learners use to operate on this primary material, and the products of these operations. These could be presentation tools; they might be shells where students compose multimedia essays; intelligent tutoring systems; or concept mapping tools. Essentially secondary courseware supports learning activities of many kinds. The third sort of courseware, and the main focus of this project, contains structures to support discussion among learners and tutors, and to capture these dialogues in order to make them reusable for the next group of students. We refer to this as tertiary courseware (Mayes, 1995). A simple example of this is Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), but tertiary courseware may be captured from many different kinds of dialogue. Using the computer to capture this material, we are making accessible something which previously has been only a fleeting experience for the small group participants. We have taught courses in which students learn on-line not only with expository materials and tasks that utilise what they are learning, but also with tertiary resources built from previous terms' discussions and annotated examples of work, as well as having their own discussion forum. We have also run more controlled laboratory studies to look more closely at the learning taking place when viewing these resources (Cox, et al., submitted). We have found, in general, not only positive learning outcomes but positive affective ones in terms of students' feeling that they are part of a larger community and that reading the discussions of others gives them a wider perspective (McKendree, et al., 1998). TDDS: Tasks for Improving Student Discussions Despite our generally positive results, it became clear early in the project that one major problem is generating good discussions in the first place (Lee, et al., 1997). Thus, a second focus of the project has been to develop methods for engaging students in effective discussions early in a course. Reasons for student silence in computer mediated discussions (as well as in face-to-face seminars) are many and varied. Some of the reasons discussed by researchers in Computer Mediated Communication for Learning (CSCL) are that students do not want to appear ignorant (van der Meij, 1988), they feel that they are talking to a 'photo-electric wall' (Sproull and Keisler, 1993), they don't know what is expected of them (Bligh, 1986), they feel that peers do not respond in the same spirit as they do (Scardemalia et al., 1992), and they find that it is too much effort and becomes a chore (Newman et al., 1995; Clark and Brennan, 1991). Even when they do try to discuss, they often find it very difficult and often comment that they have nothing to say. But what does this mean? They have nothing to discuss because they don't know anything? They don't know how to go about discussing? They don't know what they do or don't know, so they can't discuss it? Generally, when students claim they have nothing to say, they actually mean that they have no reason for saying anything. Discussion naturally arises out of specific problems or tasks. Therefore, we find it essential to give students a reason to talk, to provide a goal for discussion. To this end, we have developed a series of Task Directed Discussion games (TDDs) that demand increasingly deeper thinking about the domain to 'ease students in' to discussions (McKendree, et al., 1998). These tasks lessen the focus on trying to learn and reduce the pressure to 'sound intelligent'. All TDDs are based on the idea of eliciting discussions from students by providing them with a common focus; that is, providing a finite set of key 250 McKendree, Lee, Dineen, & Mayes