Katherine Hinchey

Learning in groups

These notes are part of a series for the book.

Outline

1. Defining the group
2. Distinctive educational group features
3. Why groups are worthwhile
4. Cooperative freedoms in groups
5. Transactional distance and control in group learning
6. Learning in groups
7. Power and trust relationships in groups
8. Understanding groups as communities of inquiry
9. The critical role of tasks on groups
10. Trust, cohesion, and groupthink
11. Social capital in groups
12. The tools of groups
13. Effects of groups on attrition
14. Effect of groups on self-efficiacy
15. Design principles for group applications
16. Conclusion

Notes

Of the three social groups Dron and Anderson identify, groups is the most familiar. A group is a group of people who purposefully come together. In a learning context, a group is a class, a university, a project team. Groups have a hierarchy, rules, and a purpose. The group exists even as specific members come and go, and the members see themselves as members of the group. A group purposefully excludes some people from membership.

This chapter goes into quite a bit of detail about groups, much of which I am skipping in my notes here because I think it’s covered pretty well in my other notes for Dron and Anderson’s writings or because I think it’s fairly easy to know intuitively.

See also: I think there may be some interesting overlap between groups and Andriessen’s (2005) taxonomy of communities.

Five-stage model

The authors identify Gilly Salmon’s five-stage model as being useful for understanding how online groups develop.

Communities of inquiry (COIs)

Another model the authors identify as useful for understanding learning groups is the COI model. This model was developed in 1999, but was based on Dewey’s (1933) model of practical inquiry, and Lipman’s (1991) community of inquiry (they borrowed the name from Lipman). The model identifies three types of presence required for learning: cognitive, social, and teaching.

Cognitive presence

This type of presence is related to critical thinking. It has four phases:

1. A triggering event, such as a question or invitation to comment
2. Exploration, in which people in the group reflect and question
3. Integration, which is the construction of meaning as a group and then integrating the meaning into conceptual models
4. Resolution, in which the group identifies ways to apply the meaning they constructed and integrated

Social presence

This is when people in the group ‘project themselves socially and emotionally, as “real” people… through the medium of communication being used’ (Garrison et al., 2000, cited in Dron and Anderson, 2014, p. 111).

There are three types of indicators of social presence:

• Affective: Humor, self-disclosure, emoticons
• Open communication: Responding to people in a timely manner, quoting people and asking specific follow-up questions, thanking people for their comments
• Cohesive communicative responses: Using inclusive language to address the group, addressing people by name

Teaching presence

This includes the instructional design, and follows through facilitation of group discussions and group activities.

Common tools to support learning groups

• An LMS reinforces the roles, structure, and hierarchy that makes up the traditional (offline) learning group.
• The virtual classroom or other similar tools provide for synchronous group activities. These are especially valued because of their immediacy and the sense of presence they provide the learners.
• Web- and text-based communication tools, ranging from email to cloud-based discussion groups.

See also

Five-stage model

Communities of inquiry

Posted on February 28, 2018 By Katherine
Categories: books Tags: Anderson, cognitive presence, communities of inquiry, Dron, five-stage model, groups, H818, learning management systems, networked learning, social learning, social media, social presence, teaching presence