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Record W297275723

Discussions: A Student-Centered Approach

2001· article· en· W297275723 on OpenAlex
Dave S. Knowlton

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueAcademic exchange quarterly · 2001
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicOnline and Blended Learning
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNoveltyHeuristicMathematics educationReading (process)PedagogyPsychologyComputer scienceSociologyPolitical scienceSocial psychology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This article supports the view that online discussions should only be used for educational purposes. In the first half of the article, a heuristic for determining the educational viability of online discussions is offered. In the second half of this article, a model for determining viability is suggested. This model integrates the evaluation of online discussion into the discussion itself. In doing so, students are participating in determining whether or not the discussion been educationally viable. ********** Online discussion is often viewed as an educational novelty. Instructors sometimes require students to participate in online discussion simply to maintain students' interest and to increase their enjoyment of a course. While it is virtuous to keep students interested and make courses enjoyable, greater virtue can be found in educating students, which should stretch students' interests and expand the range of educational experiences that they enjoy. Online discussion should be more than novel; it should be educationally viable. To downplay educational viability is to ethically breach the implied contract that institutions of higher education have with society (Speck, 2000). The purpose of this paper is to offer a model for evaluating the educational viability of online discussion. I begin by offering a heuristic for determining educational viability. Then, I delineate a student-centered procedure for applying the heuristic to an online discussion. A Heuristic for Determining Educational Viability What is educational viability? For some, a viable education should teach people to think, to use their rational powers, to become better problems solvers (Gagne, 1980, p. 85); for others, educational viability has as much to do with the teachable heart as the teachable mind (McLaren, 1999, p. 50). Narrowing to educational viability in online adds some focus. Hacker & Neiderhauser (2000), for example, discuss the educational viability of online in terms of deep and durable learning (p. 53). Specifically, they argue that active collaboration among students, the effective use of examples, and appropriate feedback will motivate students toward educational success. Knowlton (2001) approaches the educational viability of online discussion through a connection to Bloom's cognitive taxonomy. (See Bloom, Englehart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956, for a full discussion of this taxonomy.) In short, for online discussion to be viable, students must go beyond summarizing and paraphrasing; they must also apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate. The variability in defining educational viability is important to academic freedom. Ultimately, instructors using online discussion must determine and defend their own educational rationales. Here, though, I suggest three heuristic questions for determining educational viability: Does the online discussion advance knowledge construction? Does the online discussion inspire personal narrative? Is online discussion a foundation for larger course assignments? Does the Online Discussion Advance Knowledge Construction? Philosophically, the notion of constructing knowledge is based on the view that knowledge and truth do not exist-or, at least, are not relevant-beyond a person's perception of that knowledge and truth (Duffy & Jonassen, 1991). Even if an objective reality exists, students can only subjectively know that reality. Therefore, knowledge is not something that students can receive from professors (Jonassen, 1991); students must create a personal view of the world (Jonassen, Davidson, Collins, Campbell, & Haag, 1995, p. 11). In an educationally-viable online discussion, students seek opportunities to learn (Canada, 2000) and share their opinions and perspectives about those opportunities. Because of the pluralism inherent to students' perspectives (Speck, 1998), conflicting viewpoints will emerge, and students will experience cognitive dissonance. …

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Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.851
Threshold uncertainty score0.503

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.047
GPT teacher head0.368
Teacher spread0.321 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it