Idea-centered Knowledge Building Environment

Bodong ChenNov 4, 2010

What is an “idea?”• An idea could be:

– whatever is before the mind when one thinks (arising in a reflex, spontaneous manner, even without thinking or serious reflection)

– a personal view– representational images; i.e. images of some object– the content of cognition– a fundamental ontological category of being

• Karl Popper’s (1972) philosophical theory of reality:– World 1: the world of physical objects and events– World 2: the mental or psychological world—metal states or processes,

such as feelings, perceptions, memory, experience, etc.– World 3: the world of the products of the human mind, such as languages,

tales, mathematical constructions, symphonies, paintings, sculptures.– Interactions among three worlds.

Knowledge Building: Towards idea-centered education

• Idea-centered education (Scardamalia, 2002)– KB is the production and continual improvement of ideas of value to a

community (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003a).– … ideas are treated as real things, as objects of inquiry and

improvement in their own right. KB environments enable ideas to get out into the world and onto a path of continual improvement (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003a).

– … ideas that have a life out in the world, where they are subject to social processes of evaluation, revision, and application … support idea development in both education and workplace situations (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003b).

– Knowledge building refers to collective work for the advancement and elaboration of conceptual artifacts (product plans, business strategies, marketing plans, theories, ideas, and models), the entities of Karl Popper’s World 3 (Paavola et al, 2004).

Ideas in KB communities

Figure. An evolutionary view of idea improvement (Hong & Sullivan, 2008).

Environments for idea improvement

• Knowledge Building environments– Knowledge Forum

• Idea-management software– Edistorm– Wridea– IdeaScale– Jive– Kindling– …

Knowledge Forum

Edistorm

Ideascale

Kindling

Design challenges

• How to give lives to ideas in this environment?• How to support knowledge-creating discourse

in an idea-centered manner?

In Knowledge Forum

Big Ideas tool for students to make judgment on ideas’ promisingness (Chen et al., 2010).

New contexts: social media and open education

• Blog, Twitter, … • Open Learning Resources, Open Learning Initiative (OLI), P2PU, …

References

• Chen, B., Chuy, M., Resendes, M., & Scardamalia, M. (2010). “Big Ideas Tool” as a new feature of Knowledge Forum. Poster presented at the 2010 Knowledge Building Summer Institute, Toronto, Canada.

• Hong, H.-Y., R. Sullivan, F. R. (2008). Towards an Idea-Centered, Principle-Based Design Approach to Support Learning as Knowledge Creation. Educational Technology Research and Development, 57(5), 613-627

• Paavola, S., Lipponen, L., & Hakkarainen, K. (2004). Models of innovative knowledge communities and three metaphors of learning. Review of Educational Research, 74(4), 557–576.

• Popper, K. (1972). Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

• Scardamalia, M. (2002). Collective cognitive responsibility for the advancement of knowledge. In B. Smith (Ed.), Liberal education in a knowledge society (pp. 67-98). Chicago: Open Court.

• Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge Building. In Encyclopedia of Education. (2nd ed., pp. 1370-1373). New York: Macmillan Reference, USA.

• Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building environments: Extending the limits of the possible in education and knowledge work. In A. DiStefano, K.E. Rudestam, & R. Silverman (Eds.), Encyclopedia of distributed learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.