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Team role balance: Investigating knowledge-building in a CSCL environment

Alan Roberts    

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is an approach that seemingly maps neatly to the notion of equipping learners for emergent Knowledge Age work practice. However, achieving peer interaction in CSCL environments has been a recurrent problem. This study investigated if knowledge-building activity can be enhanced in tertiary education CSCL environments through the use of teams balanced by Team Role Preference.

Transcript

Interviewer: I’d like to welcome Alan Roberts, welcome Alan

Alan Roberts: Thank you

Interviewer: Firstly can you please share with us what your Research is about in a very broad sense?

Alan Roberts: Okay it’s got to do with computer supportive collaborative learning, the starting point from this was the future extensive use of On Line teaching and learning approaches is a given but list clear at the moment is the precise shape that learning will take and well what makes for a quality and engaging on line learning experience and I suppose part of moving forward is thinking about well what should it be to be an educated person in the 21st Century and in what ways do individuals need to learn if we’re going to equip them for emergent /?/ work practices.  So in this context I think the technology needs to be employed more as a tool to think with rather than just something that transfers information so the technology sort of allows for the active and creative messing with ideas.

Now computer supportive collaborative learning in my view is certainly one that seems to map to this idea of equipping people for emergent non work practice and it also maps to the idea of computer supportive collaborative work or virtual teams and so within computer supportive collaborative learning we see a lot of give and take with real practices as we understand what it is to work in virtual context.  The problem is though that while team work is seen as having many advantages in that it capitalises or seeks to capitalise on the diversity of membership, nevertheless even though a team can be comprised of very good people, they can inexplicably fail as well and it’s really hard to understand why this is but team work just as we’ve known that it’s often difficult in face to face context is also difficult in on line context, perhaps more difficult.  In thinking about this idea of diversity and how we capitalise on it, while it’s important to think about well what is that we mean by diversity and certainly the shallow….what I would term shallow diversity such as skin colour and perhaps gender, age, those sort of things but deep level diversity is more about the core of the person and their preferences and the way that they choose to work.

So within this study what I’ve attempted to do is to really focus on well if people had preferences in the way that they work, can we capitalise on that and do people at particular work type preferences, is there an optimal type of balance that we can create so that a team will work better in an on line environment and so that’s really been the approach in terms of trying to create deep level diversity in teams and then seeing whether or not they are going to perform better so basically the overall aim of this Research was to determine how is the quality or effectiveness of the knowledge building activity influenced by team /?/ balance, what impact does team role balance have on the efficiency of knowledge building activity and to what extent do team role types contribute in specific ways to knowledge building activity of a group.  To complete the study I guess the method…..the approach used was a multi case study approach which focuses on a replication logic where some of the teams that I was working with were purposely balanced such that there was a mix of team role preference, now to determine the team role preference I used what’s called the Majessorson McCann’s Team Role Index and it’s just one way of trying to see what people’s work preferences are.  So some of the teams were actually balanced, that is there was a mix of roles within the teams, other teams rather were what’s called arbitrarily allocated such that it was just a case of just putting them into a team without much consideration of the balance and so within the study then the idea was to find out whether or not the balanced teams would produce a better result than just simply the arbitrarily allocated teams.

Interviewer:  And what did you find?

Alan Roberts: Okay the findings were yes that indeed balanced teams, purposely balanced teams did produce both better quality results and they also were able to do that with far greater efficiency, significantly it was apparent that this was the case.  What did become very clear through the study was that just the volume of contribution wasn’t significant to the quality of contribution or the nature of the contribution, sometimes some things created or contributed a huge volume of dialogue in trying to develop the work that I’d asked them to do but they produced a particularly poor ranked model.  The other things were that while the volume of contribution wasn’t significant to the development of the model, it was clear that the number of iterations that a team that was associated with a team developing up the model was important and so too the spread over or the number of days that the team engaged in developing the model so those teams for example that did a huge amount of just talking about developing a model and sort to find ideas generally did poorer than those that actually started very early in developing a model and then /?/ continued to hone and develop the model as they went.

One thing that I wasn’t able to find within the study was if particular team role times contributed in specific ways, however I don’t think that such a finding precludes the likelihood that team role times do in fact contribute in specific ways because /?/ such a finding is quite plausible given that the balanced teams both produced better quality models and also did so with more efficiency.

One thing I did find though that particular team role times did contribute in at different volumes if you like and this seemed to be in part linked to the notion of extra version and introversion, that is to be extra version participants or those with a tendency towards extra version tended to actually contribute in on line forums more than those that tended toward introversion though it couldn’t be totally explained in terms of extraversion and introversions, there are other factors in there as well. 

One of the other things that happened also or that was identified was that team members tend to self sensor a lot of their work, they had reflective journals and what was written in the reflective journals often was not represented in the dialogue, there was clearly a great level of frustration at times shown by individuals in terms of working through this but that was sort of kept private and they tended to work publicly in a very positive light and in actual fact over the whole of the activity and there was some…..1,860 odd statements coded, not one of them was a disagreement statement.  So they actually avoided confrontation within the on line environment and while that can be seen as sort of positive in some senses that people do mediate the way they talk to each other, that is there’s no instances of what’s called flaming, but at the same time that does tend to work against quality knowledge building and a true use of the diversity of ideas.

Interviewer: What implications will this Research have for Education?

Alan Roberts: Yeah look I think it’s there are a number of implications for further research, I think particularly that with computer supportive collaborative learning the field of CSCL while it’s born of socio constructive approaches, there’s been too much of a focus perhaps on community and I think that researchers have tended to see participants too much as a homogeneous whole rather than a heterogeneous mix of individuals and so I think that there is a need to perhaps shift the focus and look more at individual preference in terms of how people like to work together in on line context.  I guess that as well CSCL literature has tended to push the idea that more conversation, more communication and on line environments is better, the more the better in fact…..there seems to be this idea that students will learn more if they talk more and so forth but such a finding is not supported by this study, that is the greater volume of interaction doesn’t necessarily lead to better outcomes at all, rather it’s the nature of interaction and so I guess there is a need to look at scaffolds that can improve and enhance the particular nature of interaction that promotes really good quality knowledge building within CSCL environments.  In terms of practice I think there are issues because even within University context, we tend to perhaps allocate students to on line teams by just you, you and you, however there’s certainly a tendency for certain types of team role preferences to dominate and this if there is a skewing of the team, typically what will happen is that that team will produce poorer results so if we are making on line assessment part of the student’s work and if they’re just purely allocated randomly or arbitrarily to teams then we could actually see them resulting in achieving poorer results than if they were in a truly diverse team.  There’s also sorts of things additionally that need further research, how to maintain linkage or real engagement between people but I’d suggest that it is a field that is still open for considerable research as it has been in many ways for a long time, that is the dynamic, the inter play between people is still a very challenging issue.