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Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer
ConferencingNorm Friesen
May 6, 2006
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Terms & Concepts
• Critical community of Inquiry: group engaging collaboratively in practical inquiry; usually includes a teacher
• Cognitive presence: the construction and confirmation meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry
• Cognitive Presence ≈ Critical inquiry
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Practical Inquiry Model
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Practical Inquiry
Two Dimensions:
1. continuum between action and deliberation
2. transition between concrete and abstract worlds; cognitive processes that associate facts and ideas
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Four Phases (1 through 3)
1. Triggering Event: an issue, dilemma, or problem that emerges from experience is identified or recognized.
2. Exploration: participants shift between the private, reflective world of the individual and the social exploration of ideas
3. Integration: characterized by constructing meaning from the ideas generated in the exploratory phase: reflection discourse
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Four Phases (4th)
Resolution:
• testing the hypothesis by means of practical application
• a vicarious test using thought experiments and consensus building within the community
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Critical Inquiry and CMC
• The CMC transcript is valuable in that it provides an accurate record of nearly all the dialogue and interaction that took place
• There is no body language or paralinguistic communication
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Triggering Events
• Asking questions
• Background info that culminates in a
question
• Messages that take discussion in a new
direction
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Exploration
• Personal narratives/descriptions/facts
• Divergence within community or within a message:– Unsubstantiated contradiction of previous
ideas– many themes in one message – unsupported opinions
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Integration
• Agreement within community or within a single message
• Integrating information from various sources
• Justified yet tentative hypotheses
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Resolution
• Vicarious application to real world
• Testing solutions
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Study of 24 messages; 1 week
Triggering 8%
Exploration42%Integration13%Resolution 4%
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Conclusion
• “We believe such an approach is capable of refining the concept and model presented here to the point where it can be a reliable and useful instructional tool for realizing higher-order educational outcomes.”
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Excursus on Content Analysis
• This is an example of content analysis• a standard methodology in the social
sciences for studying the content of communication
• objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages.
• Describe and make inferences about the character of communications
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Word counting
• Early and simple version is to count word occurrences
• KWIC and KWOC indexes developed for this purpose
• Zipf's law: words and phrases mentioned most often reflect the most important concerns
• "Primitive" version of this using Google• The issue of inference arises
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Other approaches• Coding frames used: identify concerns,
infer concerns, themes, processes, etc. from text and label them
• For example: Global Warming coverage– Types of guests or "experts" in news shows– In what contexts it is mentioned? Science,
lifestyle, Economics, national/international politics
• Other examples? (e.g. "issues, qualifications, horse race, and hoopla)
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Issues and Problems
• inter-coder reliability and intra-coder reliability:– Is a coder or group of coders consistent across
time?– Is a coder consistent with other coders?
• Process of inference– "Television is the primary source of presidential
election information for the majority of Americans" (Graber 1993; Hernandez 1997)
– Discussion topics and themes reflect actual group or mental processes
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Rourke (2005)
• “I analyzed the messages and the interview transcripts using qualitative content analysis techniques associated with grounded theory, and I employed measures to promote trustworthiness associated with naturalistic research.”
• 15 weeks, 67 weeklong conferences for small groups
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Potential Problem
• There may be a variety of technical, access, or deeper social, psychological, and educational inhibitors to participation in the conference, which means that the transcript of the conference is a significantly less-than-complete record of the learning that has taken place within the community of inquiry.
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Findings
Their activities included:
1. providing others with praise and encouragement,
2. presenting informal arguments,
3. engaging in discursive explorations
4. making connections between course topics and their personal experiences
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Rourke, Findings, con’t
• “Contrary to constructions of this technology in our literature, the students did not approach the conferences as forums for critical discourse or collaborative meaning making.”