I have been working with a Language Arts teacher and her group of 9th grade students to discover how students use collaborative inquiry in digital environments. I used Google Docs as the digital environment for the students to work in. I created a template based on my research model: ANTHILL. My instructional framework for the project is Guided Inquiry, which has 2 main principles; the Information Search Process (ISP) that provides us with predictable patterns of feelings, thoughts and actions as identified by Dr. Carol C. Kuhlthau, and 3rd space where student interest meets core content, where the teacher/librarian has great opportunities for "zones of intervention". To create these nearly real time zones of intervention I used a google doc for nightly inquiry journals where students could respond to a prompt I posted regarding their information search process (not about topic but about process) i.e. what search strategies did you use today that worked for you? or what caused you anxiety today? etc. One student made the analogy that doing research is like looking at her messy bedroom. Research certainly is messy. Finding answers is messy, but without questions there are no answers. So this is where we begin, at a busy intersection with no road signs to help navigate to the other side, we start in a messy bedroom and wonder where to start. My dilemma is how do I create an environment for collaborative inquiry when my students are starting with individual chaos? Who will decide what to keep and what to throw away? Who will make it aesthetically pretty and who will make it functional? What I think I am discovering in this particular design of the digital collaboration can be likened to photographs in newspapers. These photographs consist of an array of dots that are either black or white. From afar, the viewer does not see the dots, only the lines and shading, which appear to be continuous. What we know is, that in general, humans experience the world analogically. Digital is basically combining many bits in complex ways to simulate analog events. I kinda like this idea when I begin to think about collaborative inquiry, because I am seeing individuals coming together to combine their knowledge (that consists of discrete units) in complex ways. I am beginning to see the units working together to present that final picture. Collaborative Inquiry rests on the principle that experiences of individual members become the content for group action and reflection. In other words individual learning both informs and is informed by group learning.
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Author"I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." ~Winston Churchill Archives
May 2018
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