Augmenting the Learning Dialogue Online
A Q&A with Gardner Campbell
We've heard a lot lately about moving the remote learning experience farther away from a training model and closer to a collaborative learning model in which students participate together in the co-creation or discovery of knowledge.
As far back as the 1960s, alongside the work of Doug Engelbart, people have dreamed about ways to augment the knowledge worker, the researcher, the scholar, the faculty, and the student in the classroom. Today, a conversation about how to do that might consider anything from a game-changing theoretical foundation of active learning and knowledge networks to a more practical discussion of online collaboration tools.
Are we still dreaming? We asked Gardner Campbell for some perspectives from the field — based on both his extensive research (e.g., his work on the board of directors for The Doug Engelbart Institute) and his own classroom.
Mary Grush: Are we getting closer to augmenting the collaborative learning experience in our online classrooms, or anywhere near where Doug Engelbart might have hoped?
Gardner Campbell: Doug Engelbart really did imagine there would be a way to augment both our individual and our collaborative capacities, and my research (e.g., an exploration of Engelbart's thinking at framework.thoughtvectors.net) has taken me pretty far into some of his mental models for doing so. He was a great thinker and contributed important conceptual frameworks that would have made our lives today much, much better if people had paid more attention. That said, even Engelbart found it very difficult to augment collaborative work, because it may be one of the most difficult things about human communication: how to make the record of our work as a species comprehensive (no good idea lost, no breakthrough ignored, no voice unheard) as well as usable (which means indexing, curation, etc.).
We've tried to solve the problem with tagging, folksonomies, and other crowd-sourced methods but then we run into additional problems pretty quickly when the Heraclitean flux becomes unmanageable. It's what some have called the Tristram Shandy paradox, in which Shandy resolves to document every part of his life but soon discovers he can't catch up and the documentation becomes completely unwieldy anyway. It's a darkly comic moment. Engelbart seems to have seen the difficulty but he never did resolve it completely — it became at one point a source of conflict in his own lab. Alas.
As I continue to think about collaboration — what is it, how do we encourage it, how do we make it effective (and how do we define effective?) — I realize that there are four main areas of difficulty, or let's be optimistic and call them areas of opportunity. Three important areas are the medium or platform for interaction, the layer for communicating about the interaction, and the indexing or metadata layer that helps us keep track of both the interaction and the communicating about the interaction. But the primary area of opportunity, the foundation on which everything rests, is the community.
Without the community, you don't have trust, and without trust, the collaboration quickly breaks down. Without the community, you don't have a strong history of shared experience, or a robust shared vocabulary guiding and being guided by that shared experience. Without the community, you don't have a strong sense of shared purpose, the urgency or motivation to actually do the hard work of solo labor and co-labor.
Without the community, you don't have trust, and without trust, the collaboration quickly breaks down.
My own practice as a teacher during pandemic times has moved pretty sharply toward fostering community. That's part of why I say I've moved from cognition as a starting point to community as a starting point.
Like a lot of teachers, I was heavily influenced by How People Learn and other such books that emphasized the power of metacognition, of encouraging students to be aware of how they are thinking while they are thinking. It's a big reason I always want students to tell me "the story of their learning." I still think that's an essential part of learning. But I've begun to think a lot harder about getting people to believe they're telling their stories around a crackling campfire to a group of trusted classmates on the journey with them.
I've begun to think a lot harder about getting people to believe they're telling their stories around a crackling campfire to a group of trusted classmates on the journey with them.
A lot of that work, in my experience, has to be framed and encouraged obliquely. It's not the kind of thing that a trust fall or clever icebreakers or name tags or open webcams will accomplish very readily. College students have a nose for "kumbaya" moments that don't ring true. Plus many of them are shy, or uncertain of themselves in a demanding intellectual space. Everyone needs the space to become a fellow traveler. Every invitation has to feel personal, even customized.
College students have a nose for "kumbaya" moments that don't ring true.
Grush: I'm curious about any tools you might include in a vision of success in augmenting students and faculty with collaborative learning and knowledge generation, especially in our online class components. I remember we did a Q&A with you a while back that had a focus on Wikipedia.
Campbell: I've been working a fair amount with Wikipedia these days, too, both in my teaching and as I edit articles myself. Wikipedia strives to be a collaborative environment that actually produces not only an ongoing result (the article) but also a robust and usable metalayer (less successfully but still remarkably, in my view).
For some of my students, even a glimpse of that possibility is very inspiring. For others, it's puzzling or even off-putting, as they've never been in a truly and fundamentally collaborative environment when it comes to research, citation, and writing itself. And of course they've all been warned away from using Wikipedia, unjustly so, mostly because their teachers don't understand what Wikipedia is and thus have no good advice for how to use it responsibly. At least, that's my view.
Grush: There are many other platforms and tools out there to consider bringing on board as you plan your online course or program. How does that affect your current thinking in terms of getting a better, if not highly augmented result?
Campbell: One thing I've been up to during the pandemic is rethinking my approach to multiple platforms for online learning. This relates to what I mentioned earlier about community: The simple way to state it is that I've moved from foregrounding cognition to foregrounding community. That's a reductive way to put it, but it emphasizes my belief that it's very hard to encourage students to form a true learning community, one in which they are real colleagues for each other and they know we are all on the journey together.
I've moved from foregrounding cognition to foregrounding community.
But this is very hard to do in physical classrooms, too, one of the reasons I always get a little frustrated with praise of the "face-to-face" classroom. What I'm now trying to do is to tune work across multiple platforms (Zoom, Hypothes.is, a phpBB discussion forum, and WordPress) so that each gathering place has its own identity and its own unique part to play in helping to encourage community and make it visible. I've had more success than I had expected, and I've learned a great deal myself along the way.
Each platform is a mixture of the highly specific and the more-open-ended in terms of how I structure the assignments. For example, I use the discussion platform as a very loosely structured conversational space, but I require a post every weekday. I require an avatar as a visible marker of creative commitment. But I don't prompt the conversation very much at all, beyond reminding students that they will benefit from posting about specific lessons now and then, in addition to their more free-wheeling talk about, say, movies in general (for my film class) or poetry in general (for my Milton class).
That's just one example, but it represents an approach I take for all the other platforms: Zoom for live-in-the-studio synchronous meetings, Hypothes.is for social reading and annotation, and WordPress blogs for weekly reflections and the "story of your learning." It's almost as if I've built a house, a kind of social space — with different social "feelings" and activities in each of the spaces, but all the spaces help to reinforce the learning and the sense that we are all in this together. I've also used the analogy of the Magic School Bus, a series my family and I loved when we watched it together many years ago. My great ambition was to be a teacher like Miss Frizzle. I'll never hit that high mark, but with these online platforms, I do feel like I have the keys to a magic school bus of sorts — another way of helping us all feel that we're on this journey together.
It's almost as if I've built a house, a kind of social space — with different social "feelings" and activities in each of the spaces, but all the spaces help to reinforce the learning and the sense that we are all in this together.
Grush: It sounds like you are not merely investing in tools but also forming connections that create communities.
Campbell: Yes. Those communities form across the entire arc of the semester. In fact, we bring digital farewell "gifts" to our classmates on the last day of class — this shows yet another way I think about media and connection. One of those farewell gifts is from me and I've started making a little video, no more than two or three minutes, that's a montage of title slides for our Zoom meetings, avatars from the discussion forum, and screenshots of the blog sites, with some fair-use musical accompaniment. Once I'm done and I watch the video start to finish, if the video makes me cry, I figure it's been a pretty good semester.
[Editor's note: Gardner Campbell is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and a highly regarded thought leader, lecturer, and researcher on new media and connected learning communities.]