WeatherBlur: A Nonhierarchal Online Learning Community Building Bridges Among Place, Learning, and Community Impact

• In Event: Connecting Learners to Place, Space, and Personal Experience With Technology and New Media

Abstract

Objective: This research aimed to determine how a sociocultural theoretical framework incorporating Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998), Knowledge Building (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006), Place-based Education (Smith, 2002; Smith & Sobel, 2010; Sobel, 2005), and Funds of Knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) could be used to promote learning and collaboration between scientists, community members, and students within a non-hierarchical online learning community (NHOLC). WeatherBlur (NSF #1217247), used a design-based research approach, to collaboratively build an NHOLC to bring together research scientists, fishermen, students, teachers, and community members from the coastal communities of Maine and Alaska to investigate the local impacts of climate change.

Perspective: NHOLCs provide an online space for diverse participants to come together, work toward a shared purpose, and build new knowledge together. “Non-hierarchical,” in this sense, is defined as a collaborative learning forum in which teachers and scientists are no longer perceived as the sole owners of knowledge. Instead, all participants are generators of content and knowledge as well as active learners; the boundaries between teacher and student, scientist and citizen, young and old are blurred into one cohesive community of actively engaged learners. NHOLCs use existing online technologies in new ways to bring together multiple, sometimes adversarial, stakeholders to accomplish a common goal. The diverse participants would not typically have the opportunity to talk with each other, let alone solve complex real-world scientific questions together, if it were not for the affordances provided by a NHOLC.

Methods & Results: To document how collaboration happened within the project the research team used a combination of discourse analysis of popular discussion threads and social network analysis of all server-side data. The results from the social network analysis (SNA) strongly suggest that the interactions between users within the WB online platform were non-hierarchical - tests of the network’s structure revealed a low level of centralization (C=0.098) and network density (D=0.022), along with a high degree of reciprocity (R=0.59) among user interactions, which suggests a largely decentralized structure with frequent mutual discussion exchanges. The discourse analysis of discussion threads reaffirmed these non-hierarchical tendencies and how the discourse aligns to the knowledge building (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006) processes documenting: 1) high levels of complex questioning for scientific inquiry; 2) knowledge-widening and -deepening discourse; and 3) mid to high levels of explanation building. A post-hoc ANOVA found no significant differences among user groups based on the types and levels of questions they asked (Lai & Law, 2013; Oshima, Scardamalia, & Bereiter, 1996), the explanations provided (Hakkarainen, 2003), or conceptual advancement (Hakkarainen & Sintonen, 2002), confirming the non-hierarchical nature of the project.

Scholarly Significance: Overall this project provides insight into how NHOLCs like WeatherBlur provide a unique opportunity to advance current CSCL learning theories to include more diverse, yet collaborative, learning communities than is typically attempted. In addition, it has the potential to define transformative models for citizen engagement in scientific research, specifically in rural communities, while at the same time transferrable across diverse contexts for community-based science.

Authors

• Ruth Kermish-Allen, Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance

• Christine Bevc, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Karen Peterman, Karen Peterman Consulting Co.