Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer Conferencing

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Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and
Computer Conferencing

• Norm Friesen
• May 6, 2006

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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

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Practical Inquiry Model
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Practical Inquiry

• Two Dimensions
• continuum between action and deliberation
• transition between concrete and abstract worlds
  cognitive processes that associate facts and
  ideas
  

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Four Phases (1 through 3)

• Triggering Event an issue, dilemma, or problem
  that emerges from experience is identified or
  recognized.
• Exploration participants shift between the
  private, reflective world of the individual and
  the social exploration of ideas
• Integration characterized by constructing
  meaning from the ideas generated in the
  exploratory phase reflection ?? discourse

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Four Phases (4th)

• Resolution
• testing the hypothesis by means of practical
  application
• a vicarious test using thought experiments and
  consensus building within the community

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(No Transcript)
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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

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Triggering Events

• Asking questions
• Background info that culminates in a question
• Messages that take discussion in a new direction

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Exploration

• Personal narratives/descriptions/facts
• Divergence within community or within a message
• Unsubstantiated contradiction of previous ideas
• many themes in one message
• unsupported opinions

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Integration

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

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Resolution

• Vicarious application to real world
• Testing solutions

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Study of 24 messages 1 week
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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.

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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.

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Findings

• Their activities included
• providing others with praise and encouragement,
• presenting informal arguments,
• engaging in discursive explorations
• making connections between course topics and
  their personal experiences

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Rourke, Findings, cont

• 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.