Thank you for watching our video! Our project is in its early literature mapping stage. We invite you to comment on any aspect of our project that is interesting to you. We are especially interested in discussing the following questions through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion: 

1. What topics from collaborative learning literature have you found particularly relevant to K-12 classroom teaching and learning practice?
2. What gaps exist today in collaborative learning literature and/or classroom implementations of collaborative learning?
3. How can we ensure a balance of power between practitioners and researchers when translating research into practice?

Glad you are visiting our project's video; we're excited about working with practitioners to synthesize what's known about collaborative learning with technology. We'd love your input on the questions that Dalila posted or any thoughts of your own!

Welcome! Echoing Dalila and Jeremy that we're glad you're here! Looking forward to your questions and thoughts.

Hi Dalila, Jeremy, and Judi! It is so exciting to learn about your MC^2 project! The mapping of CSCL literature will be so helpful towards the work being conducted at iSAT. One area that we are particularly interested in related to K-12 classroom teaching and learning practice is paired programming.

Great idea! Certainly a useful, and very needed, effort to help translate the intellectual work of the CSCL community into impact in the classroom. I'm curious about how you constructed the topic network. With some squinting it seems like you're linking topics through references, is that right? Could you give a brief overview of how you constructed these networks of CLCL ideas on the first pass? No need to get technical, I'm just curious about how you're thinking about what constitutes a node and a link.

I like the idea of curating the network to make it more relevant to the needs of educators. This should ensure that the data represented is rich and useful to educators. However, how are you thinking about supporting the exploration of this network? As you know, ensuring productive and meaningful interactions with such a tool can be challenging!

Keep the questions coming :)

jeremy

Hi Jeremy, Judi, and Dalila,

Thanks for sharing, this is really cool! Having looked at similar bibliometric networks before, one question that comes to my mind is that I think the use of citation counts and references sometimes privileges certain kinds of work, but may not mirror what "experts" think is important or relevant. In terms of your current project, I'd imagine that other factors like a paper being theoretically v design oriented v experimental may also influence how useful they are for practitioners. I wonder if you have given thought to ways that those kinds of ideas, or similar, might be made visible in the network?  Or why it is not necessary? 

Looking forward to hearing more!!

Joshua

Hi Joshua, 

Thank you for raising this excellent point. We agree that bibliographic analyses privilege certain kinds of work and that work that is often not the type of work that is relevant to a teacher in a K12 classroom or reflective of what researchers think should count. This issue is further complicated because Web of Science (WoS) and similar databases all have their own imperfect algorithms for ranking search results that are not made transparent to the users. So, although we know how the Bibliomaps tool mapped the literature based on WoS results, a layer of mapping inherent to WoS remains obscured from us. As you pointed out, our focus on translating research into practice requires that we stay mindful of our purpose and intended audiences. 

We want to ensure that the map we take to our expert panel, consisting of practitioners and researchers, is accurate and relevant to both groups, so we plan to apply our own learning sciences and teacher education expertise to further refine the map produced by the Bibliomaps tool. We will then debrief with peers to check for the soundness of our approach and the refined map. As we center diversity, equity, and inclusion in this project, Dr. Sherice Clarke, our project evaluator, has raised another critical consideration: has the existing CSCL scholarship centered on DEI, or are such research work and publications yet to come. This important question permeates our thinking as we enter the map refinement process and think about what is visible on our map and why or why not. We hope to distill some methodological recommendations for the researchers who will do similar work in the future.

In our conversations with practitioners, the teachers tend to approach research-based recommendations for practice with an important question: “Will this work for my students in my classroom?” Our work is guided by this perspective, and we hope that our expert panel and literature map will help us understand what exists in the literature and what does not but should. We’d be very interested to learn more about your work on literature mapping and especially lessons learned that you think could be useful for this project.

Dalila

Hi Folks!

Thanks for sharing this work. I look forward to following along and learning along with you what gems this uncovers & generates.

I have all sorts of thoughts and questions, which I'll spew in no particular order:

1. On Dalila's question 3 above, a few musings: there's a big body of work and best practices around co-design. My high level summary of what I've found to be helpful is shared humility, curiosity & respect; getting all parties involved at as close to the same time as possible; and co-creating from the ground up, including goals for the collaboration. I'm also curious if you might involve students/learners in addition to researchers and practitioners. As the "end-users" in classroom collaboration, I suspect they might add useful perspectives the "grownups" might otherwise overlook.
2. I don't fully understand the bibliographic methods of mapping that are described above, but I do wonder what that method misses, and if any gaps that it might leave are a fair tradeoff for a more resource intensive method that might include some coding of CSCL-related papers? Might there be a way to crowdsource such coding? Or is the bibliographic method a sufficient approximation of a mapping one would get by coding concepts in papers?
3. I'm also a bit fuzzy about what an example outcome of the full project might be. I understand that you're early in the work, but do you have any possible scenarios that you could share at this point?

Hi Josh, 

Thank you for your questions and suggestions! I like the idea of involving students as the end-users of collaborative learning in the classroom and agree with you that we would get helpful new perspectives on what matters for translation from research into practice. In this relatively small project, we did not plan to include students in our expert panel stage. This might be an excellent and well-justified expansion of the Delphi method in the future for us and other educational researchers. We also don't have the bandwidth for manual coding, so that we will rely on bibliographic tools in this go. Judi may have more to say on this topic, but in my opinion, based on what I am seeing in the initial map, the tool is pretty good at identifying key areas and critical pieces in the literature. I think those areas will likely yield topics for the collaborative teacher/researcher writing that Jeremy mentioned. I think that more human expertise and coding might be helpful if we want to get into more specialized and nuanced areas of literature. I hope we may get to try this in our future work, and compare bibliometric tool's outputs to what we see through coding. Thanks for making us ponder these issues, Dalila.