dgroos
commented
7 years ago Novice scientists don't have the habit of searching for authoritative knowledge and this impedes a class' KB efforts. A simple motivation for looking for outside knowledge would be to use the idea above--one kind of move per note.
When glancing at a View where notes have been colored by the claimed move they make, it would be easy to notice/comment upon, "Hey, there have been lots of comments made but almost none are orange (for example, orange could represent source-based knowledge)."
This is actually related to #4 in the post above but wouldn't even need the analytics capability -- simply having colors on the bubbles would somewhat afford making this meaning.
This is a natural way of communicating. Although it is a run-on sentence it illustrates a communication containing multiple epistemic moves. When we take a turn to talk (esp referring to youths) we often do this epistemic move-mixing, and often in a meandering path.
While including multiple moves in a single note might make for a more natural expression, epistemically speaking this creates a more amorphous conversation. If we permitted (i.e. scaffolded) each note to make only a single type of epistemic moves there would be several immediate and important benefits (this list is not intended to be exhaustive):
When each contribution is a single move, ideally with some elaboration, the epistemic structure of the extended discourse becomes clearer. Single-move notes affords clearer nodes (yes, as a science teacher, I'm also ref. the plant part!), clearer in the sense of greater logical simplicity. Making the structure of the KB conversation simpler we thereby afford greater access to the discourse. It concurrently affords the opportunity for a more complex conversation than possible when the nodes contain multiple moves.
The notes can be color coded based on the type of move it's making eg "I need to understand..." can be yellow, "I have a theory" can be blue, etc. This decreases some of the cognitive load as reading is no longer required to identify the epistemic move being made.
Also, these colors make the Views more informative when simply glancing at the View.
Some simple analytics could be visually performed right on the View! For example if there were a "sort by epistemic move" button, the contributions could migrate into piles of similar moves, providing a visual indicator on the maturity of a discussion. For example, if there are lots of "I need to understand" notes but not many other types? We could call that a fairly immature discussion.
Students wouldn't need to highlight the specific part of the body text w/in a note that constituted a certain type of contribution (KT)--a number of students don't like doing that and the html code seems to be difficult to make robust.
In the note-creation process, upon selecting the epistemic move a student could be presented with some basic background detail of that move.
One shouldn't ignore the value of simple visual appeal! When one looks at a view that makes meaningful use of colors, that's nice!
Note, this approach has been used by the Finnish KB software, FLE, and the benefits above have been shown to be true through my KB experience.