Advancing the design of knowledge-building software. Presented at CSCL 2011 Symposium: Enhancing the Social and Cognitive Benefits of Digital Tools and Media.

1. Advancing the Design of
Knowledge-Building Software
Bodong Chen, Monica Resendes, Maria Chuy, Katerine Bielaczyc,
Huang-Yao Hong, Marlene Scardamalia, Carl Bereiter

2. Multiple Perspectives, Creating Connections Advanced Knowledge Embedded and
Multiple Literacies, and Public Knowledge Processes, Rise-Above transformative
And Teamwork and Improvable Ideas assessment
Graphical view Scaffolds Rise-above Analytic tools
Multimedia note Review
Build-on Revision
Co-authorship Annotation Problem
Keyword Reference

4. Overview
• Tagging Key and Promising Ideas
• Scaffolds
• Visualization
• Concurrent, embedded, and transformative
assessment

5. Promising Ideas tool
Tagging Key and Promising Ideas

6. Keywords

7. To Tag Promising Ideas?
• Promisingness evaluation (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Bereiter, 2002)
• A need to identify promising ideas
A case study on Grade 3s’ discourse

8. Promising Ideas tool
• Design-based research (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992)
Identifying ideas:
1. Click
2. Choose a color
3. Highlight an idea
4. The idea gets
highlighted and goes
to the box

9. Promising Ideas list:
Promising Ideas tool
1. Promising ideas listed
2. Choose a specific color list
3. Number of hits
4. Link backwards to notes

10. Pilot study 1: Grade 5/6 (Chen et al., 2011)
• 83 “promising ideas” from 207 notes
70.00%
60.00%
50.00%
40.00%
30.00%
20.00%
10.00%
0.00%
Theories Facts/Evidence Questions

11. Export ideas to a new view
Export selected
ideas to a new
view

12. Pilot study 2: Grade 3
• Promisingness treatment module
• “Progressive use”
– two iterations of “writing-tagging-exporting”
• Preliminary results
– less facts/evidence
– improved coverage of domain content
0.3
Cosine similarity measures
0.25
0.2
0.15
soil2011old
0.1 soil2011new
0.05
0
soilbithere soilcurr soilepa soilusda soilwiki
Expert corpus

13. Improve scaffolds
Scaffold Tracker
Scaffolds

14. 1. Frequency of scaffold use
Scaffold Tracker 2. Embellishment icons
3. Dynamic filter
4. Live update

15. Future directions
• “Dynamic promotion” of scaffolds
• Epistemic agency?

16. Content Classification
Semantic Analysis
Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment
Concurrent, Embedded, and Transformative
Assessment

17. Automated detection of “ways of
contributing”?
• Content classification
• TagHelper (Rosé et al, 2008)

18. Automated detection of misconceptions?
• Misconceptions in KF
– Healthcare (Lax et al., 2010)
Source: http://www.knowledgeforum.com/Kforum/inAction.htm
• Semantic Analysis
– Focus on predicates (Slotta et al., 1995, 2006)

19. Conclusion
• A single analysis or technique cannot do it
• Technology alone cannot do it
• Need for collaboration across teams

20. Bodong Chen
bodong.chen@utoronto.ca