In this paper, we describe the use of networked multimedia as a tool for collaborative learning. Specifically, we focus on using multimedia to foster learning through discussion. While instructional multimedia is currently enjoying a heyday, few use multimedia as a collaborative communication medium. We propose that multimedia may be used to structure and enhance communication, and thereby promote learning. Two examples of discussion tools are given to illustrate our position: The Multimedia Forum Kiosk and SpeakEasy, a discussion tool for the World Wide Web.

Collaborative Learning

Another movement contributing to the recent interest in collaborative learning is the social cognition perspective. The Russian psychologist Vygotsky studied development in children as a primarily social process (1978). He noted that children could do more with assistance (from parents, teachers, or peers) than they could in isolation. He termed the gap between solo and assisted competence the zone of proximal development, and hypothesized that development was the result of internalizing the help of others (Newman, Griffith, and Cole, 1989). Recently, many psychologists have rediscovered the Vygotskian perspective on development, and have begun examining learning and cognition as social processes, using techniques from anthropology and sociology. (Vera & Simon, 1993). Lave and Wenger (1991) and others have studied learning as an enculturation process; they identify legitimate peripheral participation as the process through which novices are enculturated into expert practice.

While controversy surrounds the social cognition perspective (see, for example, the special issue of Cognitive Science devoted to this debate, Vera & Simon, 1993) many researchers have had great success using collaboration in the classroom for learning. For example, both the jigsaw method and reciprocal teaching method have been used with great success (Aronson, 1978; Palinscar & Brown, 1984). In both of these teaching methods, students take on various roles in the knowledge building process, then work with others towards group understanding. Both of these methods fit in the paradigm of cognitive apprenticeship, where students are exposed to expert performance, scaffolded through the procedures themselves, and gradually work with less and less help (Collins, Brown, & Duguid, 1989; Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991) .

Collaboration is not a panacea. It can cause more problems than it solves (Burbules and Linn, in press; Madhok, 1993) Students may be belittled or misinformed. They may fall prey to groupthink that leads to incorrect conclusions. They may do the work unequally. They may be of such differing abilities that they fail to communicate. They may fail to assure that every group member learns. These pitfalls must be avoided by carefully structuring the collaborative activities and the structure of the groups so that each student has an opportunity to learn.

Collaborative learning activities can yield several real advantages. Students may be directed by social forces, such as desire to earn the respect of those they admire. They may be more likely to stay on task if others are doing the same. They may feel more commitment to peers than to teachers. Presentation of one's ideas to others is an excuse to formulate a clear opinion, and to check that opinion against other students. If a group has a goal of reaching consensus, discussion becomes a sensemaking activity in which students must grapple with multiple views of the material and decide among them. Learning can become a process of transformation, rather than transmission (Pea, 1994); rather than ingesting bits of knowledge transmitted by the teacher, the students must as a group transform their incomplete understanding into a more complete one.

If we take seriously the idea of collaborative learning, we must examine how to foster these collaborations. In order to do this, we examine some features of communication media that allow collaboration.

Media for Communication

One basic dimension of media is who is communicating with whom. How many people are involved and what is their relationship with each other? This communication may be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many. A crucial distinction is whether the communication is unidirectional or bi-directional. In most multimedia, communication is unidirectional. The author of the media has a message, and the audience reviewing the media at some later date is receiving the message. In mass media, the author's message is received by many individuals. Rarely does the audience get to participate in the media and communicate with the original author. Indeed, the most prevalent multimedia technology, CD-ROM's, even prevent modifying the media once it is received, much less using it to communicate with an author. Unidirectional media preclude the type of collaborative learning we are trying to achieve.

Another dimension is the timescale of the medium. Other electronic media for communication such as the fax machine, electronic-mail, a phone, have inherent characteristics that constrain their use, and define expectations in users in how they should be used. A fax is more immediate than a letter sent by airmail, but not as immediate as a telephone conversation. The timescale of the medium however does nit always determine how it is used. Expected responses times for different communication media is formed by the community that uses it, especially in electronic communities (Riel & Levin, 1990).

A third dimension of media is collocation in time and space. A frequently reproduced table divides media into synchronous or asynchronous (participants are communicating simultaneously or may act at different times), and into local or distant (participants are in the same place or are in different places). Until recently computer multimedia was largely local, due to the high requirements for transporting multimodal information.

As computers have evolved from an expensive, mostly text-based machine to an affordable vehicle for media, this allows individuals to produce for many. However, computer experts (not instructors or even authors and publishers) controlled this medium until recently.

Increased technology breaks many old barriers. Computers have evolved from an expensive, mostly text-based machine to an affordable vehicle for many types of media. Current electronic documents are multimodal, that is they can contain not only roman text, but other alphabets, images, even sound and movies. They are infinitely replicable, and may be sent in moments anywhere in the world. Perhaps most importantly, they are cheap to produce and thus may be used for one-to-one or many-to-many communication, not just the one-to-many broadcast so familiar now. It is this change that allows us to use the computer medium for communication and collaborative learning, not just publishing. There are a few examples of using computer multimedia for communication tools in the service of learning, such as CSILE (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1992), the CoVis Notebook (Edelson & O'Neill, 1994), and BoardwalkHC (Bellamy, Woolsey, & Kerns, 1995) where students might comment on each others' published works or students and teachers might respond to each other through annotations.

Electronic Collaborative Learning Environments

Socially Relevant Representations

Here, we provide two examples of multimedia discussion tools that make use of socially relevant representations of discourse.

The Multimedia Forum Kiosk

In the MFK system, an author introduces an idea or question, and participants of the discussion each contribute their viewpoint. The topics are introduced with stimulus materials that might be images, text, video, or audio. Each comment from a participant is represented by a face icon, so the identity of the contributor is immediately obvious; on the other hand, participants may remain anonymous and choose a cartoon icon if they wish not to be identified. Two screens are associated with each topic: an Opinion Area, in which users each state their overall opinions on the topic (only one comment per person is allowed, although it may be changed at any time), and a Discussion Area, in which users may respond to each others' statements. A graphical representation and categorization scheme display the unfolding discussion as a series of trees (called argument trees). Each comment is a node, and links from responses to prior comments are drawn graphically. Each link is labeled with a category that describes its relationship to the prior comment.

Multimedia technology aided in creating socially relevant representations of discourse in three ways. First, face icons of all participants of the discussion made identities salient. This allowed discussion to take on a more personal tone since participants were reminded that real people were behind each comment, and allowed participants to more easily keep track of each others' views using humans' well-tuned ability to recognize and remember faces. A second feature of multimedia was the use of images, computerized documents, and digital movies as discussion stimulus materials. Video especially was used to bring concrete examples into the discussion, to link examples of activities students had been experiencing in the classroom, or to import personal stories and add a more human feel to the topic. These images and videos were often more poignant and more effective at starting discussion than vague, depersonalized references in text. Third, computer graphics technology allowed development of the argument tree representation for ongoing, back-and-forth discussion. Without this representation, it would have been difficult to allow an asynchronous many-to-many discussion. The representation allows users to glean the relationships between statements without requiring a linear structure.

We view individuals using MFK as an intellectual tool for making explicit what is already implicitly represented in arenas such as face-to-face discussion. People remember knowledge by building on mental representations that are familiar, and socially relevant representations in interfaces capitalize on our well-developed social skills. Individuals learn when they communicate in the system by interpreting the stimuli and the conversation so far, formulating their own opinions, and then reflecting on how their views fit in to the entire discussion.

Our research to date indicates that people using the MFK system can use the system for effective learning discussions where they might not otherwise be able to hold discussions, that these discussions can form a useful part of a curriculum, and that the structure of the interface helps contribute to users' learning. More conclusive results are expected soon.

SpeakEasy: A Structured Arena for On-line Discussion

Another ideal of the Kiosk built into the structure of SpeakEasy is the importance of the participant community. Socially relevant representations provide discussion participants with knowledge about the backgrounds, ideas, and leanings of other participants to help represent the discussion. SpeakEasy, like the MFK, incorporates participants' faces in the on-line representation, as well as providing an Opinion Area dedicated to giving participants the ability to voice their overall ideas on the topic at hand. By having access to these different representations, users can get a better feel for the participant community at large. We hypothesize that participants in a SpeakEasy discussion have an easier time keeping large discussions intact and coherent in their minds (compare with UNIX readnews, which also allows open-ended discussion but does not provide much in the way of social context knowledge.)

Another important feature of the SpeakEasy interface is that it allows seamless integration with other World Wide Web-based multimedia information. Users may include links in their comments that refer to other multimedia or hypertext information on the Internet. We expect this feature to aid integration of the discussion tool into other multimedia based activities. We are currently integrating this tool with other World Wide Web materials for precollege science education as a part of the KIE (Knowledge Integration Environment) project, a project funded by the National Science Foundation and led by Marcia C. Linn of the University of California, Berkeley. By incorporating multimedia science evidence into structured discussion, we hope to bring the benefits of socially relevant representations to science reasoning.

Summary

References

Aronson, E. (1978) The Jigsaw Classroom. Beverly Hills, CA. Sage.

Bellamy, R., Woolsey, K., and Kerns, C. (1995) Design Experiments with Media-Rich Messaging. AERA paper presentation, San Francisco, CA.

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-41.

Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Holum, A. (1991). Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible. American Educator. (Winter), 6-11, 38-46.

Edelson, D. C. and O'Neill, K. (1994) The CoVis Collaboratory Notebook: Computer Support for Scientific Inquiry. Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Researcher Association, New Orleans, LA, April 1994.

Hoadley, C. M., Berman, B. P., & Hsi, S. (1995). SpeakEasy Networked Communication Tool [Tcl Programs for CGI WWW Interface]. Berkeley, CA: University of California.

Hoadley, C. M. & Hsi, S. (1992). The Multimedia Forum Kiosk v. 1.0 . Unpublished computer program for Macintosh.

Hoadley, C. M. & Hsi, S. (1993). "A multimedia interface for knowledge building and collaborative learning." Paper presented at InterCHI '93, (International Computer-Human Interaction Conference), Amsterdam, The Netherlands (adjunct proceedings): Association for Computing Machinery.

Hoadley, C. M., Hsi, S. & Schwarz. (1992) Scaffolding Constructive Communication in the Multimedia Forum Kiosk. Unpublished manuscript. University of California at Berkeley, Education in Math, Science, and Technology.

Hsi, S. (1992). The video poster: a multimedia bulletin board. [Technical Report], (August, 1992). Apple Multimedia Lab, San Francisco.

Hsi, S. & Hoadley, C. M. (1994). An interactive multimedia kiosk as a tool for collaborative discourse, reflection, and assessment. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans: April, 1994.

Hsi, S., Berman, B. P., & Hoadley, C. M. (1995). The Multimedia Forum Kiosk v.3.1 [Hypercard 2.2 Program]. Berkeley CA.

Inagaki, K. (1981) "Facilitation of Knowledge Integration through Classroom Discussion" The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, April ,Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 26-28.

Ingraffea, A. R., Henderson, T. , Agogino, A. M., Eide, A., and Aceto, J. (1991) "Synthesis: A National Engineering Education Coalition," New Approaches to Undergraduate Engineering Education III, Engineering Foundation Conference, Banff, Canada, July 28-August 2

Kerns, C. Beyond the desktop: an exploratory study of multimedia computing in the classroom. [Technical Report], Apple Multimedia Laboratory, San Francisco.

Kunz, W. and Rittel, Horst W. J. (1972). "Issues as elements of information systems." The DMG 5th Anniversary report: DMG occasional paper No. 1. Berkeley, CA: The Design Methods Group, Department of Architecture, University of California, pp. 13-15.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation . Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Linn, M. C., & Burbules, N. C. (in press). Construction of knowledge and group learning. In K. Tobin (Ed.), Constructivism and applications in mathematics and science Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Madhok, J. J. Effect of Gender Composition on Group Interaction. Technical Report from the Computers as Learning Partners Project, University of California, Berkeley, 1993

Newman, D., Griffin, P., & Cole, M. (1989). The construction zone: Working for cognitive change in school. London: Cambridge University Press.

Palinscar, A. S. & Brown, A. L. Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension-Monitoring Activities. 1, 2 (1984), 117-175.

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms . New York: Basic Books.

Pea, R. D. "Learning scientific concepts through material and social activities: conversational analysis meets conceptual change" AERA paper presentation, San Francisco April, 1992.

Pea, R. (1994) "Seeing What we build together: Distributed Multimedia Learning Environments for Transformative Communication", Journal of the Learning Sciences

3(3), 285-299

Perin, C. (1991). Electronic Social Fields in Bureaucracies. Communications of the ACM, 34(12), 75-82.

Riel, M. & Levin, J. (1990) Building electronic communities: success and failure in computer networking. Instructional Science 19, 145-169

Roschelle, J. (1992) Learning by Collaborating: Convergent Conceptual Change. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(3), 235-276

Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C. (1992). "A Knowledge Building architecture for computer supported learning." In E. De Corte, M. C. Linn, H. Mandl & L. Verschaffel (Ed.), Computer-based learning environments and problem solving. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C. (1991). "Higher levels of agency for children in knowledge building: a challenge for the design of new knowledge media." Journal of the Learning Sciences, 1, 37-68.

Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C., McLean, R., Swallow, J., & Woodrull, E. (1989). Computer supported intentional learning environments. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 5(1), 51-68.

Vera, A. H. & Simon, H. A. (1993). Situated action: a symbolic interpretation. Cognitive Science, 17(1), 7-49.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Mental Processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.