The dynamics of an online knowledge building community: A 5-year longitudinal study

This paper reports a 5-year design experiment on cumulative knowledge building as part of an international project. Through a longitudinal study and analysis of cumulative research data, we sought to answer the question, ‘what happened and why in knowledge building?’ Research data constitute messages which participants have written into a shared knowledge building database. A multi-method approach combing quantitative and qualitative data was adopted which integrated analysis of message generation, content analysis, network analysis, structure of message threads, discourse analysis and interviews. Conclusions are based on analysis of almost 2000 messages. Qualitative content analysis reveals 14 main categories of data. When the content of the messages are analysed, quantitatively cumulative trends emerge. When the frequencies of messages are plotted against time, peaks and troughs of message writing are revealed. The explanations for these patterns and variations are sought through interviews. Social network analysis shows that the network is centralised. The research literature suggests that decentralised networks are ideal, but in this particular case, the expert centralisation was beneficial for knowledge building in the collaborative and associated professional networks. The reasons for this are discussed. Introduction The purpose of this research is to learn more about the processes of cumulative knowledge building in order to create, maintain and improve knowledge building systems through which some of the complex problems of modern knowledge societies might be addressed. The research is based around cumulative knowledge building in an British Journal of Educational Technology (2009) doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00972.x © 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 Becta. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. international project of Environment and School Initiatives (ENSI) (Mylläri, 2006). Because this longitudinal design experiment is over several years, it provides new insights into cumulative knowledge building in educational situations. ENSI has a record of over 20 years of innovation and action research in environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD). ENSI is an international school research and development network established in 1986 under the auspices of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Centre for Education Research and Innovation. Its original research innovators were professors Peter Posch and John Elliot (Åhlberg & Heinonen, 2004). OECD has 30 member countries sharing a commitment to democratic government and the market economy. Best known for its publications and its statistics, OECD’s work covers economic and social matters from macroeconomics to trade, education, development, and science and innovation. During 1986 to 2005, ENSI grew into a prominent global EE and ESD project. According to Rauch (2002), ENSI is seen as a breeding ground for promoting innovations. The years 2005–14 are the United Nations’ Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, coordinated by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). To mark this, ENSI adopted the idea of cumulative knowledge building. It was decided that the Finnish ENSI team, with funding from their Ministry of Education, should test cumulative knowledge building through the platform known as Knowledge Forum®. In 2000, one of us (MÅ) visited professors Marline Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter at the University of Toronto to study knowledge building with the online environment Knowledge Forum®. The experiences from the first year of the Finnish work in the ENSI project with Knowledge Forum® on the themes of ‘learnscapes, ecoschools and teacher education’ were very encouraging (Åhlberg, Kaasinen, Kaivola & Houtsonen, 2001). The research reported developed from the experiences of the Finnish work, and involved a learning community, which included representatives from schools (principals, teachers), universities (professors, researchers, students), the National Board of Education (educational administrators) and the international ENSI/OECD/UNESCO programme. An important goal was collaborative knowledge building to promote EE and ESD as part of teacher in-service education. No roles were explicitly allocated within the community, although one of us (MÅ), as the main researcher and supervisor of the several Finnish participants researching for academic theses as part of the project, was recognised as facilitator. Knowledge Forum® is an open and flexible collaborative environment for knowledge building developed at the University of Toronto. When knowledge is constructed collaboratively, a shared workspace is used into which every member of the community may contribute messages (also called ‘notes’). Messages may consist of text, diagrams or images. When a message is closed, an icon of it, with the title and the name of the author, is displayed. It is possible to open other people’s messages and construct 2 British Journal of Educational Technology © 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 Becta. ‘build-on messages’, and by doing so, develop the ideas of the original writer, possibly in ways that the original writer could not imagine. Knowledge Forum® makes it possible to integrate the knowledge and skills of a number of participants. The build-on message is shown as a line from the first message to the second message. It is possible to quote from other peoples’ messages by selecting and copying text between messages. Quotation marks appear with an icon that refers to the original message. Clicking the icon opens the original message as a whole and reveals the context from which the quote came. The database may be divided into ‘views’. Messages may be moved or copied from one view to another. The database may be searched by keywords, authors, dates, etc. It is the cumulative nature of Knowledge Forum® that is the focus of this paper. In the research reported here, knowledge building is used in the sense outlined above and explained in detail in Scardamalia and Bereiter (2006) (Figure 1). The research is conceptualised through the ‘integrating’ theoretical framework of Dillon and Åhlberg (2006). The notion of ‘integrating education’ has itself been developed collaboratively and cumulatively over many years: ... learning may contribute to a collective vision that is strongly motivating and leads to a shared positive view of core processes, roles and responsibilities. Both the vision and the strategy for accomplishing it are subject to continual scrutiny and constructive criticism. The purpose is to broaden both thinking and the possibilities for personal and collective action. (Dillon & Åhlberg, 2006). Figure 1: A typical Knowledge Forum® 3.4 knowledge building view with two messages opened Dynamics of online knowledge building community 3 © 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 Becta. Cumulative knowledge building incorporates elements of both collaborative and cooperative knowledge building. It is the systematic, incremental, integration of new knowledge with existing knowledge that makes it cumulative. This is typically associated with continual quality improvement through constructive scrutiny and criticism, followed by practical application, leading to improvements in practice, which are both theoretically and empirically based. The Finnish ENSI community is ‘distributed’ in the sense that the participants are separated geographically and temporally when using Knowledge Forum® and applying outcomes in their own institutions. However, twice a year, they meet face to face to discuss environmental and sustainability education and review intiatives of common interest like improving school environments and biodiversity. The local application of knowledge means that knowledge developed cumulatively may have practical manifestations in very different ways. For example, of the two most active Finnish schools, one is rural, the other is urban. Representatives of the two schools were party to the same collective thinking and exploration of possibilities, but the practical actions were very different. This is a manifestation of what Dillon (2008) has called ‘niches of cultural production’, reflecting the ‘particularity, subtlety, idiosyncrasy, and patina of locality at scales, at time frames, and through modes of organisation appropriate to those places and the enterprises within them’. In this paper, 5 years of data arising from the use of Knowledge Forum® by the Finnish/ ENSI community are presented. The focus of the paper is on the dynamics of cumulative knowledge building rather than the content of the knowledge produced. The frame for analysing data was derived from the ‘mutual shaping lens’ of Boczkowski (1999, 2004) which he developed through research into how the introduction of digital technology changed news production and social networking processes, and the identities of the individuals involved. The research reported here describes changes in both the social and the technological elements of the knowledge building community. Social lenses into the community are: the active participation formations (through quantitative analysis of the database); the structure of the interaction network (through network analysis); what the participants in the knowledge building community perceive to be the meanings of their participation (through interviews); and the content and the structure of knowledge building (through content analysis and discourse analysis). The technological lenses are: the structure of message threads produced by the community; the way in which the knowledge building community structures the content (knowledge building ‘views’); and the relation of both to development and variation during the 5 years of the study. Collectively, these lenses provide a cumulative picture, an integrated ‘total environment’ view of the dynamics of knowledge building. Methods Messages which participants wrote into the shared cumulative knowledge building database provide the research data. A multi-method approach combining quantitative and qualitative data (Brewer & Hunter, 2005) was adopted, which integrated analysis of message generation, content analysis and structure of message threads. The same data were also subjected to social network analysis (Wasserman & Faust, 1994), in particular, using UCINET (Analytic Technologies, Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA) 4 British Journal of Educational Technology © 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 Becta. software (Borgatti, Everett & Freeman, 2002). Data were also derived from interviews with: (1) participants who were continually active in the knowledge building system, (2) participants who were active in its earlier phases only, and (3) passive participants.