5.4.4: KNOWLEDGE BUILDING

These are the ideas regarding knowledge building and the power of collaborative KB that remained with me:

The power of collaborative learning emanates from its potential to coalesce multiple people into the coherent cognitive effort of a group.

The nature of the interaction  was  sequential – the  weaving of  contributions from the other members of the group as individuals into group processes of meaning  making - as each responded to previous entries and elicited new ones. The meanings — shared by the group - by virtue of their having been co-constructed in the collectively experienced sequential interaction — were embodied in team knowledge about knowledge building. This collaborative knowledge building produced the team’s outcomes, which was driven by the group’s task – For this purpose- Knowledge on knowledge building.

Individual Participation and engagement produced a collective understanding of what knowledge building was and the rubric too. The thoughts that emerged were new to the members of the group, superior to their previous understandings, and for the good of all.

 Knowledge building went beyond sharing of thoughts and moved toward new collective thoughts that emerged only because members were committed to pushing the basis of existing knowledge and learning ideas for others to expand further.

The Knowledge-building activity was a success because the subject matter  was  problem-focused –coming up with a rubric on knowledge building and also what knowledge building was all about..

The success of this activity lay in its dual capability to support the collective learning of the members of the group by building on the information artifacts produced by another and improving upon what each member knew about knowledge building.

In order to help the members in the group to avoid repeating themselves but to encourage creating and testing new ideas, a collaborative knowledge-building framework that accounts for participation, collaboration, and shared understanding - a wiki was used.

In order for a member to participate meaningfully in collaborative knowledge building, members were to be ready (to generate knowledge) to help formulate initial thoughts on the discussion topic and also build on the same.

 Connecting to collaborate was achieved by brainstorming, exploring all points of view, challenging perceptions, ensuring equality of voices, and stretching individual perspectives to embrace others’ perspectives.

 Shared understanding is individual. The ownership of a new perspective accepted by the group is collective.

 Any challenges  during  this activity?

The difficulty in generating knowledge, given an artificial classroom situation, time constraints (the election saga) and a lack of commitment to the ideas of progressive discourse.

 At first I was primarily concerned with sharing information rather than with adding to the existing content on knowledge building as contributed to by my group mates. However, In order to bring myself back to the reality of knowledge building as it should be I had to accept the idea of distributed learning and understand that each group member plays a part in it within the group. In that way, I came to realize that knowledge building supports the collective learning not only of the present group but also of future groups as well.