Thought-bounces as a collaborative interaction feature for co-creation of new ideas

Abstract

Collaborative learning does not happen just by merely assigning tasks to students in groups. One of the factors identified for the success of collaborative learning is the interaction among the working members. When it is said interaction, it is not any type of interaction, but a particular type of interaction. Dillenbourg (1999) mentioned three criteria for the particular type of interaction as ‘collaborative interaction’. These three criteria based on Dillenbourg’s intuition, have been the fundamental grounding on which this research paper stands. In an ordinary conversation, people often bounce their ideas, and this notion of ‘ideas being bounced’ is an informal expression in the English language.

The main aim of this research is to identify the interaction pattern, and the distinctive feature that is used to co-create new ideas, in other words collaborate successfully. Successful collaboration is referred to, at least in this research paper, the interaction of learners when they actively co-create new ideas. A detailed literature review begins on the successful collaborative learning and collaborative interaction. The notion of language, identity and epistemic modality further explored through a sociolinguistic perspective. It was postulated that the usage of language could actually influence the co-creation of new ideas. The importance of co-creation of new ideas were discussed.

This paper is based upon mixed methodology namely: Observational study and Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA), which later narrowed down to Conversational Analysis (CA). As the QCA was chosen, thus made this study to be based upon the inductive reasoning philosophy. The data was collected by the PROMO research team from the Faculty of Education, University of Oulu, Finland. The collected data consists of 12 postgraduate university students working in three groups of which each group with 4 participants respectively. The assigned group task was an open-ended, problem-based question which enables the participants to engage in epistemic reasoning by predicting, rationalising, and proposing possible solutions for the identified core problem. The entire three hours of each group work were video recorded, total amount of nine hours of video data. Every group’s conversations were categorised to ‘on-task’ and ‘off-task’ talks. The on-task category were later sub-categorised to ‘epistemic’ and ‘metacognitive’ talks. A micro analysis (CA) was conducted to the group’s conversations to identify the interaction pattern, and the distinctive feature that lead to successful collaboration (co-creation of new ideas).

As the result, this paper has identified, and reports on the distinctive feature of the collaborative interaction that could lead to successful collaboration. It was found that thought-bounces is the distinctive feature identified when participants co-create new ideas. It is believed that the implications of a continual investigation along the collaborative interaction and thought-bounces prototype, would definitely open up other possible research pathways which definitely be an advantage to the larger education, and learning sciences community.