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Editor’s Note: This paper researches and demonstrates a constructivist model for synchronous online learning. It follows a sequence of presentation, interpretation and concept development that stimulates discussion and peer learning, and results in greater uniformity and depth of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of both content and the learning experience.

The Teaching Moment:
a learning metaphor

Mia Lobel, Michael Neubauer, Randy Swedburg

Abstract

A learning segment from a synchronous, online, 3 credits University level course entitled “AHSC/298 Computer Mediated Interpersonal Communications” is presented primarily to make transparent the process of constructing knowledge in the eClassroom. The story of “The Stone Soup” is used as a metaphor to contextualize both the content of the learning segment and the thrust of this description. In the eClassroom, the Instructor’s contribution, or ‘stone’, is a pictographic ambiguity image, while the students provide the ingredients of their perceptions to create a soup that is rich in synergy. The discussion is practitioner oriented and includes comments about the instructional design, a brief diagnosis of the group’s dynamics at the time, and a short analysis of participants’ interaction patterns during the learning segment presented.

The Unwrapped Interaction Diagram, based on the research conducted by the Instructor and her team, describes the parallel nature of online real-time communication, as contrasted with the serial nature of face-to-face communication. It is hoped that this expository account will be as a ‘stone’ placed into the distance education cauldron, in order to encourage other synchronous online educators to join into the process and add their own unique ingredients.

Introduction

The Internet is saturated with distance education claims about learning environments, effective pedagogies, teaching modules, skill training techniques and community building models. Typing into Google: “online teaching training distance education” nets one 265,000 hits. Typically, efforts to deliver educational content and to construct knowledge online seem to be asynchronous. The synchronous teaching ‘engagements’, either attempt to incorporate high tech features like sound and/or video into their delivery method, while others seem to use Java based synchronous chat modules which only allow interacting in simple ASCII text. In general, one presumes that at least some portion of the teaching effectiveness claimed by this vast community of practitioners is predicated on long-term preparation, research, and experience. However, what this preparation may involve, on what specific data the opinions are based, or what the actual teaching really looks like, remains largely unclear.

“The Stone Soup” is an Eastern European folk tale. At the end of the war, a group of bedraggled soldiers come upon a devastated village. The inhabitants, having hidden the little bit of food they still had left, watched as one soldier made a fire, another fetched water in a cauldron, while another removed an ordinary looking stone from his pouch and placed it into the boiling water. Having accomplished this task, the soldiers settled around their campsite and began talking enthusiastically about their anticipated meal. The first soldier said: “Yes, stone soup is my favorite, but once I had it with cabbage, and that was delicious!” Hearing this, the bravest of the villagers, approached the cauldron and threw in his cabbage. The second soldier said: ”Ah, yes, but when you add a bit of beef, well…” Next, it was the village butcher who added a piece of meat he has been hoarding to the soup. Eventually, everyone sat down together to partake of the best soup the villagers have ever had. Before they left, the soldiers gave the magic stone to the villagers, reminding them that the stone’s power is actually in their cooperation.

Like in the children’s folk tale “The Stone Soup,” there seems to be a famine of empirical information about how learning actually takes place in the synchronous distance education village. Everyone seems to agree that knowledge is being delivered and the practitioners have found the delivery methods that serve them. The content of the knowledge being delivered is largely known, and often, grounded in theory. What seems to be missing is twofold: what are participants saying and how are they saying it? How is the learning task accomplished, and how are the group’s dynamics facilitated to allow the learning to unfold? This paper is an attempt to make transparent the process of experientially constructing knowledge in a real-time eClassroom, which has been described in Lobel, Neubauer, & Swedburg (2002).

The following account may be viewed as offering that which is invited: namely, other practitioners with whom to dialogue, and share the ingredients involved in creating the content and process of facilitating online real-time learning. The particular ‘teaching moment’ offered here seems apt in several ways. It demonstrates how people with different points of view, sharing their perspectives, can and do create a common pool of knowledge, where the lowest common denominator is raised to the highest one. The learning segment presented in this paper includes and makes visible the elements sought above: namely, the preparation, the research and the experience used to design, deliver and process a learning sequence. Like in the story, the Instructor provides a “stone” by posting a pictographic ambiguous image. As each villager brings her own unique contribution to the interaction, the resulting synergy-rich “soup” belongs to everyone. Could not any community, including one of teachers and learners, dialoguing in this manner produce the same result?

Essentially, teaching begins with the belief that “The way of the teacher is a practice in trust” (Arrien, 1998). The trust involved in this case study is supported by decades of observing the learning process, and is anchored by theories of learning and of group development to active practice and risky experimentation. “Trust the process” and “Be open to outcome,” accurately describe the value-base of the primary Instructor’s teaching approach. In keeping with “the Stone Soup” metaphor, the teacher brings the cauldron, builds the fire, puts the “magic” stone into the boiling water and trusts that eventually the audience will engage enough to bring their own hidden ingredients to the process.

WHAT

eAHSC/298ZG Computer Mediated Interpersonal Communications is a new 3 credits, on-site course, given as part of the Cree Family Life Education (FLE) Certificate (FLEC) awarded by the Applied Human Science Department (AHSC) at Concordia University, in Montreal. The course had four components and objectives and combined two settings (i.e. Face-to-Face (F2F) and in the online eClassroom) with the emphasis shifting from one learning venue to the other, depending on the particular component under study.

The overall mandate of the course and the learning spaces to be used are described in the Course Outline:

1.      Facilitate your written English skills. (F2F)

2.      Increase your basic computer and Internet skills (F2F & eClassroom)

3.      Clarify your understanding of AHSC/230 ‘Interpersonal Communications and Relationships,’ specifically as it relates to online interactions. (eClassroom & F2F)

4.      Demonstrate how to co-create and maintain a safe and productive online community to meet your learning and social needs in the future. (eClassroom)

The 9:00 to 17:00 schedule for this five-day intensive course that began on July 27^th/2002 and ended on July 31^st/2002 was broken up into English (9:00 to 12:00), Computer Skills (13:00 to 14:30), Review (15:00 to 16:30) and Journaling Time (16:30 to 17:30). A second course, entitled AHSC/298 ‘Computer Mediated Task Groups’, which includes the same components, but with emphasis on online facilitation, is scheduled for another five days in October 2002.

At the end of each day, students responded to a questionnaire on a number of measures, which will be analyzed and presented by the authors, in a separate article.

The particular Learning Module on Perception described in this paper was delivered on July 29^th/2002, which was the 3^rd day of the course. The Activity1 section of the Perception Learning Module under discussion lasted from 13:51 to 14:20, a total of 31 minutes.

WHERE

The course took place in several locations. The venue, for the Review component of the AHSC/298 ‘Computer Mediated Interpersonal Communications’ course, was the computer lab at the Concordia University’s Arts and Science Learning Center facilities. The high tech room is equipped with a “Smart Board,” over-head screens and rows of computer booths along with comfortable rolling chairs. There was enough space at the front of the room for students to eventually “roll” themselves into a F2F circle to receive instructions and process the eClass.

WHO

The participants in the course are ten students registered into the current FLEC Program and two Cree Teaching Associates, graduates of the FLEC Program and a BA in AHSC, who accompany and assist the students through all the courses in their program. The participants, all female, came from disparate northern Quebec Cree communities to take a five-day intensive course at Concordia University campus, located in downtown Montreal. All the students are employed by the Cree School Board as Student Affairs Technicians and are completing the FLEC to improve their work skills. Their job mandate is to liaison with teachers, parents, and students in crisis situations, and in general, to assist students and their families with ongoing life skills, such as problem solving and conflict resolution.

As seen in Table1, the age range is between 28 and 53years, the average age being 38 years. Some of the women had to drive for eight hours to reach an airport to fly south, while others were already in Montreal, pursuing other studies. Most students arrived alone, but some had children and/or spouses accompanying them.

All the women have access to computers and the Internet at their workplace. Half of the women have access at home, and all have had some experience with online interaction, in the form of email and chatting. Three of the twelve students, who rated themselves less than comfortable with computers, are the oldest ones in the class, and they are also the women who do not own home computers.

Table I. Participants Statistics (N/I=no information)

The students’ mother tongue is Cree and English is their second language. Perhaps because theirs is an oral culture, in general, the students’ verbal skill levels are higher than their writing skills. The range of written English skills, within the group, is highly varied. Some were able to produce university level academic work, while others struggled with syntax, grammar and punctuation. Similarly, students’ computer skills ranged from “technical expert in school” to “needing practice with the mouse.”

The teaching team included a primary Instructor (Mia), a co-Instructor (Shirls), an English Guest-Instructor (Judith), a Data Manager (Susan), and a Web Master (Mike).

HOW: The Process

“Inclusion,” defined as seeking and committing to membership in the learning process, proved to be problematic for several reasons. The initial introduction to the top-heavy teaching team was formal and didactic, instead of personal and sharing. Like in “the Stone Soup” story, the villagers initially seemed unwilling to contribute to the visitor’s soup. Students, however, were at ease with the co-Instructor (Shirls), who had already met, taught and formed friendship ties with group members on their own “turf,” and who was also the only channel of communication available to the students, prior to their arrival. Throughout the course, the co-Instructor was also learning, along with the students some of the computer skills presented, as well as familiarizing herself with the rhythm and culture of eClassroom interactions.

The primary Instructor (Mia) had no indication of the students’ levels of competency in English or in computer skills, until the first class session. The fact that the skill levels were extremely varied amongst the participants did not initially facilitate the general learning process, yet inadvertently, it served as an opportunity for the participants to engage in collaborative learning and experience first hand the inherent value of sharing knowledge. In this aspect, the villagers freely shared their various expertises with each other, and everyone benefited as a result.

The Review Section of the course took place online, although the students and the teaching team were together in the same computer lab. For the first two days, the transition from the F2F to the online “teaching space” was difficult to manage. For example, students either vocalized with their neighbors in the computer-room, or small talked with each other in the eClassroom, basically ignoring the primary Instructor’s messages.

The third day, the primary Instructor intervened, by inviting the students into a face-to-face circle in order to give everyone an opportunity to pick a rock from a small pile of rocks she has brought to class. To introduce the activity, the primary Instructor described her metaphor for the rock gifts (i.e. ancient, solid, anchors, and “stone soup magic”). She used the Feedback Formula, which was part of the class content, to self disclose (i.e. “When I send you messages in the eClassroom and you do not reply, I feel excluded, frustrated and very impatient, because I am so eager for us to get on with sharing what we know, with each other”). Finally, after participants finished choosing a rock, the Instructor asked only one question from each participant: “Please tell me what is it that I may know about you.”

The ensuing affective data flow and the primary Instructor’s responses transformed the emotional climate and led to new inclusive behaviors. As participants unburdened themselves of fears and joys they were holding, the atmosphere warmed up, a palpable sense of solidarity emerged, and communication lines were rearranged to include the primary Instructor, who was gratefully “knitted” into the fabric of the group.

The second intervention related to the transition between the learning spaces mentioned above (F2F & eClassroom). Towards this end, it was decided to begin each segment of the course by leaving the computer stations and gathering into a face-to-face circle in order to receive concrete instructions as to what will be done next and what is expected from each student for that upcoming activity. This new norm served to reduce students’ “conceptual anxiety” and increase their sense of trust and control during the activities and processing discussions. The Perception Activity presented in this paper took place after this first circle was completed.

HOW: The Task

As stated in the course outline, the overall Objectives for the Perception Learning Module were:

·        To explore issues in “Perception” and to demonstrate the impact diverse “phenomenological realities” may have on interpersonal communications.

·        To illustrate the value of learning/understanding/accepting the diverse perceptions individuals bring to the learning process.

·        To increase students’ awareness of the “natural” tendency humans have to make interpretations and assumptions, and react “as if” these interpretations were the only absolute facts.

·        To illustrate the benefits of diversity for building and maintaining an online learning community.

Because the experiential model requires both Concrete Experience and Active Experimentation (Kolb, 1984), besides the theoretical Lecturette, there are typically two Activities and two Discussion Sessions built into each Learning Module. As a rule, the first activity is short and it is meant to be a lead-in for the second one. In the case of the “Perception” Learning Module, it seemed applicable to introduce the topic with a simple image that could be interpreted in different ways. As mentioned, the decision to use an image instead of a story-text was based on the information that the Cree culture is basically an oral vs. a written culture. The pictographic ambiguity images used in the past for similar purposes did not seem culturally appropriate and it was fortuitous to have found the head/figure image, as shown in Figure.1 (Eskimo-Indian, 1996)

Figure 1. “The stone”

The Classroom Picture Manager uploads the image to the server from either the Participant’s computer or from anywhere on the Internet, in two easy Browse/Upload steps. Any image with a URL can then be posted into the eClassroom. (Lobel, et. al. 2002)

The AHSC/298 Stone Soup

There were 171 messages posted into the eClassroom during this 31 minute learning segment, an average of 5.5 messages per minute. The posts shown below are screen shots of the original posts. On the upper left corner of each post are: the number, the date, and the time of the post and the name of the participant.

And now, this is what transpired:

DISCUSSION

Each colored square in The Unwrapped Interaction Diagram (Figure 2) extended along the time axis indicates the time when each participant posted a message. The students are represented by gray squares; the primary Instructor (Mia), the co-Instructor (Shirls) and the Data Manager (Susan) are represented by red, orange and green squares, respectively.

If there is no line connected to a color square, the individual’s communication was addressed to the group as a whole. If there is a line connected to a color square, the interaction is meant to either initiate an exchange or respond to a previous posting by whomever the arrow indicates.

The Unwrapped Interaction Diagram makes the parallel nature of the communication patterns in the eClassroom apparent at a glance. The eClassroom instantaneously collects the data, updates, and displays the Unwrapped Interaction Diagram, as it unfolds. The metric measures of the participant’s Attention Rates and Participation are also collected and displayed in real-time (Lobel, et.al. 2002a)

Figure 2. The Unwrapped Interaction Diagram

Similar to previous online synchronous groups studied in the eClassroom, the Greeting and Gathering Stages discussed by Lobel, et. al. 2002 lasted about twenty minutes (13:25-13:51). The arrows indicate a lively interaction among the students as they enter the classroom and re-include themselves into the group, by discussing their adventures during lunch.

At 13:51, the primary Instructor, taking advantage of a conversational lull, gets the students’ attention by posting the ambiguous figure-ground perception image (Fig.1) into the eClassroom. Prior to this time, as the arrows indicate, the students are interacting among themselves, but after the picture is posted Student-to-Instructor interactions increase. Note that during this time frame the arrows representing communications become more horizontal, which speaks to the parallel nature of the synchronous interaction.

As can be seen, at 14:05 Rose shares what she sees in the image posted by the primary Instructor. From that moment on, the absence of messages posted describes how students shift from the discussion to reviewing the image, wanting to see what Rose saw. At 14:18 Rose clearly describes what she sees and by 14:20 everyone sees four pictures in the image posted by the primary Instructor.

It seems clear from the interactions presented that participants learned, through exchanging personal perspectives, to see what they could not see before. The Instructor addressed the group’s process and posted an image into the eClassroom to solicit people’s points of view. Congruent with the metaphor used, this is seen as providing the cauldron and the “stone.” The participants took the risk and added their own unique perceptual ingredients to create the final “soup,” which was more nourishing than “soup” individuals would have made on their own.

CONCLUSION

Adult learners from disparate locations, with varying levels of competency in written English and in computer skills participated in the synchronous, online eClassroom, and constructed lasting knowledge by using only words, emoticons and one image. The parallel nature of the interactions allowed students to conduct multiple conversations and to benefit from every other participant’s point of view.

The design of the teaching segment presented is seemingly simple. To locate culturally appropriate teaching materials was time consuming, but the “core work” was in building trust in people and in the growth process, so that learning can unfold. The ambiguous figure-ground image used was the stone that the instructor put into the cauldron, trusting that people interacting will produce some knowledge.

It seems safe to conclude that the synergy created by students’ contributions enlarged everyone’s knowledge base, and the “soup” that was concocted was far richer than most would have been able to make on their own. The learning segment presented makes transparent the actual “soup to nuts” process of teaching in the eClassroom. It is hoped that this account will serve as one “stone” for a much needed “information soup” to be co-created by synchronous distance learners and educators.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the students for gifting us with their consent to use their names and contributions for our research.

Bibliography

Arrien, A. (1993). The Four-Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer and Visionary. San Francisco, CA.: HarperSanFrancisco

Eskimo-Indian. (1996). Retrieved July, 2002: http://www.eaglehawksc.vic.edu.au/kla/art_graphics/illusion/illus21.htm

Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Lobel, M., Neubauer, M., & Swedburg, R. (2002). Elements of group interaction in a real-time synchronous online learning-by-doing classroom without F2F participation. USDLA Journal, April 2002. (Retrieved May 5, 2002: http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/APR02_Issue/article01.html )

Lobel, M. Neubauer, M., & Swedburg, R. (2002a). The eClassroom used as a Teacher’s Training Laboratory to Measure the Impact of Group Facilitation on Attending, Participation, Interaction, and Involvement. To be published in Athabasca University’s, International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, October 2002.

About the Authors

Mia Lobel
Westmount Psychology Center
4211 Ste Catherine West
Westmount, QC H3Z 1P6
mia@alcor.concordia.ca
514-935-6268 x223

Mia Lobel has been instrumental in developing innovative programs since 1973 when she co-founded the Women’s Information and Referral Services of Montreal. A mother of three, in 1985 she received a M.Ed. in Educational and Counseling Psychology, from McGill University. Since then, she has been a Part-Time Faculty member at the Department of Applied Human Sciences/Concordia University and a Psychotherapist in private practice. Ms Lobel has developed experiential modules to teach communication skills, conflict management, team building, and diversity for face-to-face and online academic and organizational learning groups.

Michael Neubauer
5 des Erables
Katevale, QC J0B 1W0
neubauer@slac.stanford.edu
819-847-0076

Michael Neubauer is an Engineering Physicist at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford, California. He has consulted on a number of technical projects internationally. He has twenty years of management experience in technical disciplines and systems administration. His technical interests are in numerical analysis of complex multi-dimensional problems.

RB Swedburg, EdD
Chair, Applied Human Sciences
Concordia University
7141 Sherbrooke Ouest
Montreal, QC H4B 1R6
Tel 514-848-3331 514-848-2277
Fax 514-848-4200
swed@vax2.concordia.ca

Dr. RB Swedburg is a professor and chair of the department of Applied Human Sciences at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. His major research interests are in the areas of lifelong learning, successful aging and lifestyle.

These are areas where he has received many research grants, published frequently and is a speaker locally, nationally and internationally. His teaching has covered many areas, most recently leisure education, older adulthood and lifelong learning.

In 2001 Dr. Swedburg received the Concordia University Alumnae Award for teaching excellence. Fellow and Director, Concordia University Centre for Mature Students; Senior Fellow, American Leisure Academy; Past President of the American Association for Leisure and Recreation; Fellow, North American Society for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance; and, Vice-President, Institute Development, Elderhostel Canada are all tiles Dr. Swedburg holds or has held.

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