Designing System Dualities: Building
Online Community
Sasha Barab
Rebecca Scheckler
James MaKinster
Indiana University Bloomington
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Overview
• Introduction
• Online Communities
• Inquiry Learning Forum
• Analytical Tools for Characterizing
Community
• Conclusions
• Implications
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Community
• Long and rich tradition
• Sociology, anthropology, psychology,
philosophy, advertising, business, popular
culture, and education
• Use of “community” in education
• Dewey,1916; Lipman, 1988; Roth, 1998;
Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994, Sergiovanni,
1994 , 1996; Preece, 2000, Westheimer, 1999
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Online Communities CoP
• Designing and building Communities
• Kim (2000); Preece (2000)
• Researching online communities
• Hakken (1999); Jones (1999); Smith &
Kollock (1999)
• Many educational communities are
moving towards supporting the
development of a CoP
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Community of Practice
We define a CoP as a persistent, sustained
social network of individuals who share
and develop an overlapping knowledge
base, set of beliefs, values, history and
experiences focused on a common
practice and/or mutual enterprise.
Mutual Enterprise:
• Shared knowledge base, beliefs, values
• Overlapping history
• Interdependence among others
• Reproductive cycle
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8 Characteristics
(1)shared knowledge, values, and beliefs;
(2)overlapping histories among members;
(3)mutual interdependence;
(4)mechanisms for reproduction;
(5)a common practice and/or mutual enterprise;
(6)opportunities for interactions and participation;
(7)meaningful relationships; and
(8)respect for diverse perspectives and minority
views.
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Inquiry Learning Forum
• Designed to support a virtual community of
in-service and pre-service mathematics and
science teachers sharing, improving inquiry-
based classroom practices
• Three design principles:
• Visit the classroom
• Foster ownership and participation
• Focus on inquiry teaching and learning
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Analytical Tools for
Characterizing Community
• Design experiments (Brown, 1992)
• Two theoretical frameworks
• STINs – socio-technical interaction
networks (Kling, et al., 2001)
• Dualities – four dimensions within the
challenge of designing for learning
(Wenger, 1998)
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Historical Methods
• Central Subject Problem (boundaries)
• Colligation Problem (case endures)
• Kernels (complex causality)
(Abbot, 1992, 1994; Hull, 1975; Isaac, 1997)
Events Episodes Braids of Change
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Core Dualities
• Designed & Emergent
• Participation & Reification
• Local & Global
• Identification & Negotiability
• Online & Co-present
(Barab, Scheckler, & MaKinster)
POLES Dynamic Interplay
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Designed & Emergent
“no community can fully design the
learning of another … [however] no
community can fully design its own
learning” (p. 234).
• Responsive Design
• Usability Sociability
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Designed & Emergent
• Self-Organizing Design
• Minimalist set of structures
• Bottom-up approach
• Collaborative model (local & Global)
Facilitators (Useless Math)
Working groups
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Participation & Reification
• Participation
• Refers to the practices themselves.
• Identity is constituted through relations of
participation
• Reification
• Transforming experience into a “thing”
• Way of transforming local experience into
something that can have global significance
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Participation & Reification
• ILF classrooms
• Posting comments
• ILF notion of “Inquiry”
• Taken out of context
• Everything on-line is a reification
Fundamental to the negotiation of
meaning
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Local & Global
• Local practices are driven by
immediate needs and may remain
unaffected by global reform agendas
• The more local the unit of analysis,
the less global significance this
experience may have for others
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Local & Global - Challenges
• More detailed info takes more time and less
overlap
• One challenge is to find a means of sharing local
practice in a way that can have global significance.
• Conversely, an additional challenge is to
communicate a global reform agenda in a manner
that will have local relevance and value.
Trailers
Moderators
Share ideas
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Identification & Negotiability
• Identification
• There is a community identity to which members
can identify
That which provides experiences through which
individuals can build their identities
• Negotiability
• The degree to which members can influence the
meanings and community identity
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Identification vs. Negotiability
• ILF classrooms are reifications of what new
members use to identify with the community
• Goal was to create a critical mass
• Embody ideas, philosophies, commitments of
the ILF
• Therefore, there exist limited opportunities for
negotiation
• Stakes for negotiation are high
• Limited anonymity
• Very public
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Online vs. Co-present
• Are they different?
• Three issues
• Technology challenges
• Trust and persistence of ideas
• Negative
• Positive
• Opportunity to build networks of support
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Tensions/Dualities
• Immediate need & Transforming Practice
• Over designing & Participatory Evolution
• Coherence & Diversity
• Gatekeeping & Community Ownership
• Building Community & Supporting Work
Groups
• Online & Face-to-Face
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Conclusions
Web-Based Communities
• Create Support
• Anytime Anywhere Bounded Participation
• One Space Multiple Groups
• “Community” Socio-Technical Networks
Instructional Design Process
• HCI HHCI
• Usability Sociability
• Principles Dualities
• Cycles Trajectories of Braids
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