General developer forum

Hi Tom,

Thank you for your reply. Comments below.

You wrote:
Looking through your screenshots I was initially confused because the first shots looked very similar to our forum module. But the later shots indicated some organizational principles in FLE3 that seemed to focus student thinking about certain topics.

You are right the Knowledge Building tool is a discussion forum, but still there are remarkable differences that are more than just semantic. The main difference is the use of the knowledge types within the notes. The knowledge types are guiding students to have meaningful discourse. The knowledge types are there to support students to, for instance, to present problems, own hypothesis, scientific theories and come-up with summaries. Please, have a look again the following screenshot:

http://fle3.uiah.fi/screen_shots/Pages/Image3.html

In this one you see that when writing something to the forum the user is asked to define her input to choose what kind of knowledge she is going to contribute to the knowledge building.

And in the next screenshot:

http://fle3.uiah.fi/screen_shots/Pages/Image4.html

In here the user is writing her contribution, and gets some tips for writing a proper My Explanation note (note the Flea asks). Behind a link there is also a short help text explaining what My Explanation means. I copy-pasted it here, too:

My Explanation presents your own conceptions (hypothesis, theory, explanation, interpretation) about the problems presented by yourself or some of your fellow students. "My Explanation" is not necessarily well defined or articulated early in the inquiry process. However, it is crucial that the explication of your explanations evolves during the process and your working theories become more refined and developed.

If I'm correct, you are suggesting that when a student thinks through an issue or problem, it is sometimes helpful to sort this knowledge into certain organizing principles. So, for example, a student may want to evaluate some information (and might need some organizational prompts to do so). Or a student might want to summarize an idea or test it against scientific method, etc...

Yes. Or actually the idea of the knowledge types (also called thinking types) is to scaffold student to work according to certain model, for instance the way of scientific discourse. When students are asked to contribute certain type of knowledge to the discussion they start to think according to these categories.

The point is that the knowledge types are used in a discourse carried out with others - knowledge building is always a collaborative process.

In my mind, these are similar to rhetorical strategies for parsing ideas and focusing language. I'm having trouble imagining a module, per se, that offers this kind of structured experience, though I am sure it is possible.

How I see it is, that the knowledge building could be an extension of the current forum of the Moodle, still totally separate learning activity tool.

It may look trivial, but actually there is quite a lot of things different in the knowledge building if you compare it to Moodles forum.

A while back, many of us were interested in a forms module which would allow teachers to create fields of information that could be sorted in flexible ways (kind of like a Moodle-based Filemaker Pro database interface). I think if we had such a module, you could easily build in this kind of functionality.

Yes, for sure. I guess the greatest challenge is the user interface.

I don't believe this kind of experience is missing in Moodle (you can do similar tricks with forums, wikis, glossaries, etc.), but we could always work to make the experience more prominent and functional for teachers.

You are absolutely right. The knowledge building is in the first place a pedagogical model and way of thinking and working in a learning community.

You can carry out knowledge building with paper and pen, or with sand and stick. Still some tools are designed to carry out some specific task and often for this reason are more useful in that task than some other tools.

What it comes to Moodle I think there are so many other great tools that would support the collaborative knowledge building activity, such as calendar, glossaries, time/theme/group based organizing of the course, etc. These are all great and something we are missing in the Fle3.

For this reason I would like to see knowledge building tool in Moodle, too.

Actually (in Fle3 vocabulary) the hierarchy goes so that knowledge building is a feature and progressive inquiry is a one application of it. Other applications we have been developing and testing are design thinking and learning diary.

Well, I am sure you know how difficult it is to name things and there are many researchers who do not accept the hierarchy we are using.

"One of my most-wanted uses for these are to tag discussions so that we can have bug tracker forums inside Moodle (to replace the abysmal separate system we have now).  Issues can be moved between forums, tagged and sorted.  This of course, will have a lot of educational uses, some of which seem similar to what you are doing in Fle3."

This sounds interesting, if I got it right. I think your design approach is very unique, too. You want to solve the problem of bug tracking, but same time you see that your solution could have some educational, use as well.

With knowledge building just simple tagging or labelling discussion notes is not enough. The labels should also include descriptions, check lists, starting sentences, icons, colours and possibility to make rules between the tags (this can follow this).

"The second future development is what a lot of people here call "learning outcomes" or "learning goals".  These are statements that are decided for a whole course, and the idea is that each activity (and later individual posts, blogs etc) can be explicitly related to these goals.  This would help structure what people do in all the activitities."

Hmm I am not sure if I understand this. Got to search a little more about this from the Moodle site's forums.

I'll try. Is the idea that at first the teacher and the students are setting up the learning goals of the course and then in some point of the course, or in the end of it, students are asked to collect under these goals their activities? I think this is a brilliant idea! It makes the learning visible and asks students to reflect their activities to the objectives of the course (and their own objectives).

"How do these fit in with your ideas on knowledge building?  Do you think they are compatible or were you thinking of something much more specific?"

I would really like to see inside Moodle a knowledge building tool, with fully editable and exportable knowledge types. I also think the tool should be fully separate from the forums of Moodle. There are differences. For instace the knowledge building notes should be kept only inside the server - not forwarding to emails. This is because in a knowledge building discusssion you should feel free to present also initial and naive theories, incorrect thoughts etc. without a fear that  someone may use them against you.

So, Why I would like to see knowledge building tool in Moodle, if there is already one in Fle3?

I am repeating myself, but in Moodle there are so many other great tools for collaborative learning, that are missing from Fle3. On the other hand a great tool for "real" social constructivist learning online is still missing.