Supporting Educators' Connecting Learning Through Open Web Annotation

• In Event: 43.010 - Connected Learning and Equitable Participation for Youth: Bridging the Home-School Participation Gap

Abstract

Purpose. This session suggests it is necessary to bridge in-and-out of school youth learning. If educators are to help facilitate such learning, how might they discuss relevant pedagogy? This poster describes a professional learning initiative - designed according to connected learning (Ito et al., 2013) and computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) principles - that has supported educator discussion and collaboration about connected learning (Author & Blinded, in press; Blinded & Author, 2018a). Specifically, this initiative mediates educator learning through open web annotation (OWA), a means of reading and writing the web through collaborative conversation (Author & Blinded, 2018).

Theoretical Perspective. Perspectives on CSCL require attention to pedagogical, social, and technological elements (Kirschner & Erkens, 2013; Wise & Schwarz, 2017). CSCL pedagogy, in the featured initiative, assists educators’ use of OWA to share expertise, ask questions, and explore problems of practice (e.g., Lockhorst, 2004). The social element of this CSCL initiative supports group collaborative practices (e.g., Stahl, 2017) as educators make their thinking available to others and create a visual record of accessible knowledge. The technical affordances of OWA create a CSCL environment for educator collaboration that encourages multimodal expression, cross-context linkages among resources, and curated conversations. This study asks: How do educators collaboratively discuss youth cross-setting learning via OWA?

Methods. This poster reports findings associated with a social design experiment (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), or equity-oriented design-based research directed toward inquiry and change. Launched in 2016, the Marginal Syllabus is a CSCL initiative that sparks and sustains conversations about educational equity via OWA. The 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus, hosted by the National Writing Project, was organized around the theme “Writing Our Civic Futures” and featured eight OWA conversations. Data for this study were collected using an open service for capturing and reporting OWA data. Two Marginal Syllabus conversations were selected for this study based upon their relevance to youth learning across formal and informal settings. These data were analyzed using topic modeling methods (e.g., Zhao et al., 2011), social network analysis, and inductive discourse analysis (Gee, 2011) to describe how educators collaboratively discussed youth cross-setting learning via OWA.

Results. When discussing student learning across settings, topics prevalent in educators’ OWA conversation included “student,” “literacy,” “participation,” and “experience.” A full summary of topic modeling and social network results will be included in the poster. In one example featuring six educators, prominent conversation topics included “self,” “experience,” “real,” and “learning.” Discourse analysis of this conversation thread further suggests these educators were attuned to students’ neighborhood knowledges, the challenges of incorporating “real connections… real learning” into classroom instruction, and the impact of sociopolitical realities (i.e. #MeToo) on students’ interest-driven learning.

Significance. This study demonstrates the role of OWA in mediating CSCL initiatives that support educators’ professionally-relevant connected learning. Moreover, mixed analytic methods provided insight into educators discussing their role facilitating connected learning and, specifically, how they might assist youth in learning across settings.

Author

• Jeremiah Holden Kalir, University of Colorado - Denver