Methods for studying the processes of interaction and collaborative activity in computer-based educational activities

Abstract

Drawing on the work of researchers in several disciplines, this article describes and discusses methods which can be used for analysing joint activity during computer-based, side-by-side, collaborative activity in educational settings. It is argued that the choice of methods in any particular study should take into account the range of well-founded methods which are available, rather than being guided only by researchers' established affinities for particular methods and paradigms. The positive and negative features of qualitative and quantitative methods are discussed. The complementary use of different types of methods is also discussed and exemplified.     

Theoretical and pedagogical perspectives on orchestrating creativity and collaborative learning

The role of teacher is increasingly related to designing and arranging collaborative learning situations in which fruitful and creative group work may occur. This thematic review presents recent studies on creativity and collaborative learning from the perspective of the teacher as conductor of learning processes. The precondition for the design and orchestration of these kinds of learning situations is analysing and understanding of creative and collaborative processes and their contextual adaption. Thus, the first section of this review focuses on the theoretical vantage points of creativity and collaborative learning mainly from socio-cultural perspective. Based on this theoretical grounding, the second section describes principles for orchestrating productive collaborative learning and supporting creativity from the teacher’s perspective. We discuss three dimensions related to how teachers can bring about collaborative learning and creativity: (1) general pedagogical bases, (2) teachers’ pre- and real-time activities and (3) opportunities and challenges for teacher activities. The review is concluded with theoretical and practical implications regarding collaborative learning and creativity.     

Combining individual and group-level perspectives for studying collaborative knowledge construction in context

The aim of this article is to identify concepts and methods for studying collaboration in context. The article presents a two-level methodology designed to combine individual and group-level perspectives for the evaluation of collaborative knowledge construction in student groups. The group-level analysis is focused on the students' negotiation processes. A self-report questionnaire gives insight into students' short-term impressions, meaningful activities and personal meanings attached to different activities. Empirical examples of the analysis of a teacher student group illustrate the applicability of the methods used in investigating the mediating influence of context on collaborative activity.     

Cognitive preferences and creativity: An exploratory study

Cognitive preference, a cognitive style acquired through life and learning experiences and representing a distinct orientation to the processing of information, is related to creativity in this study. Significant correlations were observed between cognitive preference and verbal creativity but not with figural creativity as measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking.     

Explicit reasoning, creativity and co-construction in primary school children's collaborative activities

This paper describes research that explored the question of whether or not it is possible to characterise and teach a single type of educationally productive talk. We analysed and compared the quality of children's interactional strategies when jointly working on a reasoning task and a psycholinguistic task. The latter involved writing an integrated summary of three related texts. Sixth grade primary school children (11–12 years old) solved these two tasks as pre- and post-tests before and after training in the use of ‘Exploratory Talk’ (ET) to think together and argue as well as in strategies for producing summaries. After training, children improved substantially in the use of ET when solving the reasoning but not the psycholinguistic task. However, using ethnography of communication methods to analyse the talk further around the latter task revealed that both the number and quality of communicative events and acts increased importantly. These changes were accompanied by a significant improvement in the quality of the summaries produced. These findings suggest that the requirement for explicit reasoning in the definition and analysis of ET may be task dependent. To account for the common features of the educationally productive talk in the two settings, we propose the more inclusive concept of co-constructive talk to characterise the inter-subjective orientation, social ground rules and communicative actions that support effective collaboration, co-ordination and creativity.     

原创力的回归:朴学精神的思考--读胡适的《清代学者的治学方法》

胡适先生在《清代学者的治学方法》一文中着重从历时的角度考察与分析宋明以来学者的治学方法，强调了归纳与演绎相结合的重要性，突现了“朴学”的“科学”精神。文章初步解读胡适先生的《清代学者的治学方法》，着重突现其所提倡的科学方法，进一步深入认识朴学精神的精髓。     

Developing outdoor and adventurous activities for co-existence and reconciliation in Israel: an Anglo-German approach

Conflict resolution between different social groups is an issue that has continued to gain high profile news coverage both nationally and in a global context. In this respect, it has been shown that carefully designed and managed physical activity programmes can make a small but nonetheless invaluable contribution to reconciliation and co-existence within deeply-divided communities and socially fractured societies. Where this has been successful it is possible that projects such as these can be designed to be tangible products that not only facilitate co-existence work but can also be part of a more sustainable product that local coaches, teachers and community leaders can continue to promote through the teaching of core values and principles. This paper highlights how outdoor and adventurous activities (OAAs) can be used as a means to address co-existence and reconciliation within a deeply-divided society and outlines the work that is currently being undertaken in northern Israel by an English and German project team.     

Learning for well-being: creativity and inner diversity

This article explores the perspective that well-being and creativity can be nurtured in children through understanding and addressing the diverse ways in which children learn, communicate, and develop (inner diversity). In particular, our working hypothesis is that focusing children’s and young people’s learning towards the realization of their well-being supports and enables creativity. But it also requires, firstly, addressing how children perceive, engage with, and express creativity in different ways and, secondly, nurturing the development of core capacities to, in turn, underpin their capacity to develop key competences and skills in formal and non-formal learning settings. In recommending that education systems take the well-being of children as their central purpose, we are suggesting that there are capacities, ranging from personal qualities to behavioural skills, which are necessary for the development of the personal resources to enable lifelong and life-wide learning.     

Genetic rhetorical criticism: An alternative methodology for studying multi-versioned rhetorical works

This essay presents genetic rhetorical criticism as an alternative methodology for the study of multi-versioned rhetorical works. In contrast to methodologies of textual authentication, which focus on the synchronic delivery of public address, genetic rhetorical criticism focuses on the diachronic movement of writing that both precedes and exceeds the work’s introduction to public history. It does so by affirming the value of unauthorized versions of rhetorical works, which deepen the field’s understanding of both particular rhetorical works and the textual dynamics of rhetoric. To support these claims, this essay reassesses the textual histories of both Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives. Engaging both works simultaneously shows that there are fundamental features of textuality that unite speech-centered and writing-centered rhetorical works. It also demonstrates that the textual histories of rhetorical works can support multiple scholarly interpretations.     

Artistic creativity across the adult life span: An alternative approach

Conclusion The foregoing discussion attempts to present a preliminary exploration of the relationship between selected aspects of creative activity and life span developmental processes. It proposes some degree of synchronism between the maturational needs of the creative individual and both the forms of expression available to the artist through his/her selected artistic idiom and the predominant art ideology (or ideologies) of his/her cultural milieu. I believe this synchronism is necessary for the maintenance of creative effectiveness during certain definable life transitions, such as the approach to midlife, to which I refer in some detail in the discussion of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode and, more briefly, in the case of other distinguished Romantic and Victorian authors.As this has been an initial exploration, the developmental linkages proposed are, by nature, quite broadly conceived. It will take substantial effort to elaborate these claims, but the effort should be weighed against the opportunity of eventually being able to formulate a coherent, albeit tentative, theoretical model of artistic creativity in the life cycle. For this to be made plausible, other life stages and transitions should be approached in the same comparative manner, investigating the developmental significance of certain established thematic and structural recurrences in the works of, for example, elderly artists. While practically every art historian or biographer mentions the artist's later works in relation to earlier ones, a direct, systematic exploration of the subject has rarely been attempted. The tendency for art critics to overemphasize the formal analysis of isolated works of art and the reluctance of experimental psychologists to develop qualitative methods of creativity assessment have combined so far to arrest the evolution of appropriate paradigms for life span creativity research. It is my hope that this paper will make a modest contribution to changing this situation.     

海外留学人员为国服务的效益与发展对策

虽然有部分海外留学人员居留在国外 ,但同样是我国人才和智力资源的重要组成部分 ,他们为国服务所产生的经济效益和社会效益是巨大的 ,应该得到公正的评价。我们必须继续与海外留学人员建立多种形式、多种渠道、互利互惠的合作关系 ,以实现“双赢”     

Secondary school creativity,teacher practice and STEAM education: An international study

How creativity in education is applied by teachers to secondary school contexts is dependent on how the term ‘creativity’ is grounded, politicised, and practised. This paper reports on an international study of secondary schools in Australia, USA, Canada, and Singapore investigating how creativity is understood, negotiated, valued and manifested in secondary schools, focusing on teacher and student understandings, actions, benefits and impediments to creative and critical thinking. Participant reflections revealed inter-, trans- and cross-disciplinary learning shaped by teacher collaboration, dialogue and classroom organization that fosters critical and creative thinking. Implications are made for the ways practicing teachers develop and foster creativity via pedagogical approaches that enhance connectivity and interdisciplinarity of teaching practices between domains of learning. An education-based Creativity Index through which administrators and teachers can gauge, assess and implement creative skills, capacities, pedagogic practices and assessment of creativity within secondary schools is posited. Implications for STEM/STEAM education and centralizing creative capacities in teaching, learning, and educational change are offered.     

Teaching creatively and teaching for creativity: distinctions and relationships

The distinction and relationship between teaching creatively and teaching for creativity identified in the report from the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE, 1999), is examined by focusing on empirical research from an early years school, known for its creative approach. The examination uses four characteristics of creativity and pedagogy identified by Peter Woods (1990): relevance, ownership, control and innovation, to show the interdependence of the NACCCE distinctions. We conclude that although the NACCCE distinction between teaching creatively and teaching for creativity has been useful as an analytical tool, it may, at the same time, have dichotomised an integrated practice and we suggest that a more useful distinction for the study of creative pedagogies would be the relationship between teaching creatively and creative learning.     

An interactive online course: A collaborative design model

The purpose of this paper is to describe the evaluation results of using an interactive design model for the development of an online course. Specifically, it examines: (a) how an interactive design model was used to develop collaborative and cooperative learning activities; (b) how activities were structured to promote the level and quality of communications among students, as peers, and between students and the instructors; and (c) how students responded to such interactive design model. The paper also provides information about the delivery process and describes what happened when this interactive model was fully implemented and used.     

Teaching for creativity: towards sustainable and replicable pedagogical practice

This article explores the pedagogical significance of recent shifts in scholarly attention away from first generation and towards second generation understandings of creativity. First generation or big ‘C’ creativity locates the creative enterprise as a complex set of behaviours and ideas exhibited by an individual, while second generation or small ‘c’ creativity locates the creative enterprise in the processes and products of collaborative and purposeful activity. Second generation creativity is gaining importance for a number of reasons: its acknowledged significance as a driver in the new or digital economy; recent clarification of the notion of ‘creative capital’; the stated commitment of a growing number of universities to ‘more creativity’ as part of their declared vision for their staff and students; and, the recognition that the creative arts does not have a monopoly on creative capability. We argue that this shift allows more space for engaging with creativity as an outcome of pedagogical work in higher education. The article builds on the project of connecting ‘creative capital’ and university pedagogy that is already underway, assembling a number of principles from a wide range of scholarship, from computer modelling to social and cultural theorising. In doing so, it provides a framework for systematically orchestrating a ‘creativity-enhancing’ learning environment in higher education.

伦理的现实问题研究及方法绪论

研究是一种穷根究底、锲而不舍的思考活动。伦理无时不在,道德无处不有。研究现实生活中的伦理的根本方法仍然是研究,除此之外,想寻找到一种灵丹妙方或点石成金之术,那是绝对不可能的。即使能有一本现成的“方法论”,你按他的方法去研究,他按他的方法去研究,大家都按同一方法去研究,那么,方法的一般必然使成果也落入一般,面目雷同,毫无新意。     

高中生英语词汇学习的困难及解决的方法

以探讨高中生学习英语词汇的困难为切入点,简要分析了词汇教学的内容和现状,并结合学生学习的具体情况提出了如何在学习中开展词汇学习的方法和技巧.