1. Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer Conferencing Norm Friesen May 6, 2006

2. Terms & Concepts Critical community of Inquiry: group engaging collaboratively in practical inquiry; usually includes a teacher Cognitive presence: the construction and confirmation meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry Cognitive Presence ≈ Critical inquiry

3. Practical Inquiry Model

4. Practical Inquiry Two Dimensions: 1.continuum between action and deliberation 2.transition between concrete and abstract worlds; cognitive processes that associate facts and ideas

5. Four Phases (1 through 3) 1.Triggering Event: an issue, dilemma, or problem that emerges from experience is identified or recognized. 2.Exploration: participants shift between the private, reflective world of the individual and the social exploration of ideas 3.Integration: characterized by constructing meaning from the ideas generated in the exploratory phase: reflection  discourse

6. Four Phases (4th) Resolution: testing the hypothesis by means of practical application a vicarious test using thought experiments and consensus building within the community

8. Critical Inquiry and CMC The CMC transcript is valuable in that it provides an accurate record of nearly all the dialogue and interaction that took place There is no body language or paralinguistic communication

9. Triggering Events Asking questions Background info that culminates in a question Messages that take discussion in a new direction

10. Exploration Personal narratives/descriptions/facts Divergence within community or within a message: –Unsubstantiated contradiction of previous ideas –many themes in one message –unsupported opinions

11. Integration Agreement within community or within a single message Integrating information from various sources Justified yet tentative hypotheses

12. Resolution Vicarious application to real world Testing solutions

13. Study of 24 messages; 1 week

14. Conclusion “We believe such an approach is capable of refining the concept and model presented here to the point where it can be a reliable and useful instructional tool for realizing higher- order educational outcomes.”

15. Excursus on Content Analysis This is an example of content analysis a standard methodology in the social sciences for studying the content of communication objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages. Describe and make inferences about the character of communications

16. Word counting Early and simple version is to count word occurrences KWIC and KWOC indexes developed for this purpose Zipf's law: words and phrases mentioned most often reflect the most important concerns "Primitive" version of this using Google The issue of inference arises

17. Other approaches Coding frames used: identify concerns, infer concerns, themes, processes, etc. from text and label them For example: Global Warming coverage –Types of guests or "experts" in news shows –In what contexts it is mentioned? Science, lifestyle, Economics, national/international politics Other examples? (e.g. "issues, qualifications, horse race, and hoopla)

18. Issues and Problems inter-coder reliability and intra-coder reliability: –Is a coder or group of coders consistent across time? –Is a coder consistent with other coders? Process of inference –"Television is the primary source of presidential election information for the majority of Americans" (Graber 1993; Hernandez 1997) –Discussion topics and themes reflect actual group or mental processes

19. Rourke (2005) “I analyzed the messages and the interview transcripts using qualitative content analysis techniques associated with grounded theory, and I employed measures to promote trustworthiness associated with naturalistic research.” 15 weeks, 67 weeklong conferences for small groups

20. Potential Problem There may be a variety of technical, access, or deeper social, psychological, and educational inhibitors to participation in the conference, which means that the transcript of the conference is a significantly less-than- complete record of the learning that has taken place within the community of inquiry.

21. Findings Their activities included: 1.providing others with praise and encouragement, 2.presenting informal arguments, 3.engaging in discursive explorations 4.making connections between course topics and their personal experiences

22. Rourke, Findings, con’t “Contrary to constructions of this technology in our literature, the students did not approach the conferences as forums for critical discourse or collaborative meaning making.”