Knowledge-building community model

Draft

Definition

We define Knowledge-building community model is a sort of instructional design model developed by what we can call the "Toronto school".

Bereiter and Scardamalia believe a knowledge-building community should be modeled after scientific research centers, where “problem redefinition at increasingly high levels is the goal, based on a fundamentally social process. Researchers benefit from the advances of others, with continual interplay of findings, not just among scientists working concurrently but from generation to generation.”(1994). Knowledge-building communities support discourses that aim to advance the knowledge of the members collectively, while supporting individual growth with the aim of producing new experts and extending expertise within the community's domain.

A KB community can engage in collecting information, supporting discourse and exchanges, encouraging a social and professional network of learners and experts and making the knowledge acquired collectively available for future use. That even children in elementary school levels can engage in knowledge-building makes the process accessible to all levels of education.

Bereiter and Scardamalia's knowledge-building model for educational contexts suggests a way to organize instruction so that student initiated contributions to the collective knowledge and peer evaluation of knowledge produced is possible. Knowledge forum is their technological response to the needs of building a KB community. At the center is support for "knowledge-building discourse".

Knowledge-building discourse

Knowledge-building discourse has certain characteristics defined by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1994) and outlined here:

• Focused on problems, not topics: knowledge is advanced through discussion and argumentation in the effort to understand concepts and resolve discrepencies.

• Decentralized, open knowledge building, with a focus on collective knowledge: through constructive social interactions with others engaged in similar or related problems.

• More knowledgeable members are engaged in the knowledge-building process, but do not delineate the limits of investigation.

• Less knowledgeable members' participation is valued as it determines the gaps, inadequacies, difficulties in the knowledge being created that can demand a clarification of ideas by the 'experts'.

• Engages a broader knowledge community than that involved in the current local problem, bringing in views from the outside.

• Makes for a "second order environment" (one where the one's adaption to the environment changes the environment itself) where one's contributions can determine what contributions will follow, thus changing the direction of the discourse and the knowledge constructed.

These characteristics are built into the framework of CSILE designed as “an enabling technology for knowledge-building discourse.”

A summarizing excerpt from the poster session "Sustaining knowledge building communities: E-learning and knowledge building environments" at an ikit.org event in 2004

Sustaining knowledge building communities online requires the creation of electronic environments that support both formal and informal learning, and capture significant tasks and activities that are central to the day-to-day work of the participants. These environments must provide supports for real world activities and learning, while providing the potential for something more. That something more is knowledge building, or the production and continual improvement of ideas of value to a community (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003). Knowledge building is emergent; an environment that supports it must evolve from the contributions of team members and demonstrate collective knowledge advances (Scardamlia, in press).

Examples

• This wiki
• php.net
• social software websites like [1], [2]

Technology

• CSILE and Knowledge Forum
• Wikis, in particular sophisticated wikis like Mediawiki on which this one is based
• C3MS and other kinds of portalware
• LMSs (by repurposing the way they are intended to be used !).

References

• Hakkarainen & De Jong, Toward practices of knowledge building. (symposium). Proceedings of the 8th European biennial meeting for research on learning and instruction, (Göteborg, Sweden), 1999.

• Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1994). Computer support for knowledge-building communities. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(3), 265-283. [3]

• Swan, K., Shea, P., Fredericksen, E., Pickett, A, Pelz, W. & Maher, G. (2000). “Building knowledge building communities: consistency, contact and communication in the virtual classroom.” Journal of Educational Computing Research, 23(4), 389-413.