ELX2 - A useful starting point in the literature

I've chosen to write about “An analysis of higher order thinking in online discussions”, McLoughlin & Mynard, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, Vol. 46, no. 2, May 2009, 147-160.

It's fair to say that having spent perhaps more time on this article, through the necessity of writing about it, than many others, that it has not retained the initial impression that I formed of it. Nonetheless, it remains, at the very least, a useful jumping off point for a number of themes which I consider significant.

The first positive feature of the article is its clarity. As one new in the Education field (my background is Linguistics) I have not found all the publications uniformly accessible. Also, I have been struggling with some foundational questions, one of which is what constitutes the knowledge, or the knowing, that education facilitates? My own learning, or thinking style, is based around a dialogue between theory and practice – I find if quite difficult to think in purely theoretical terms, at least at the beginning of an endeavour. I found that this paper provided me some handy, admittedly simplistic, relations between theory and practice, which I have been able to use to start to construct my own theoretical position. Emphasis on the “start”.

McLoughlin & Mynard do not particularly position their paper as a response to the question of what education is; instead they discuss specifically what constitutes “higher-order thinking”, mainly through a suite of papers co-authored by Garrison, and they ask whether evidence of higher-order thinking can be found in online communities.

The short answer is that such evidence can be found. The model of higher-order thinking used is quadrangular, the reasonably intuitive categories being “triggering”, “exploration”, “integration” and “resolution”. In particular, “resolution”, which is defined as the ability to implement the knowledge in a useful way, allows this model to be neatly dovetailed with the (more abstract) behavioural & cognitive models of education which emphasis an endpoint of behavioural change (see for instance, Uden & Beaumont (2006), Chapter 1) .

I also found the discussion of Garrison et. al.'s “social presence, teaching presence, cognitive presence” model to be a useful starting point for thinking about the learning community as an abstraction.

One of the weaknesses of the paper might be its failure to place itself in a clear experimental context. The authors claim, I think, to be constructivist, citing Garrison as a standard bearer for Dewey: “...learning...a collaborative process of constructing meaningful knowledge” (p.149); however on p.150 “resolution” is being discussed in terms of “having acquired new knowledge”. I would have described the focus on data quality displayed on pp. 152-153 as being resolutely empiricist.

There are some other weaknesses in the paper qua paper, but even these weaknesses are interesting and useful. There was no particular need to, for example, introduce a discussion about the relative merits of face-to-face versus online learning within the context of this particular experiment, which was simply an evaluation of one particular online learning experience. However, the referencing to Freiermuth (2002) and Newman, Webb & Cochrane (1995) provide useful jumping off points to useful discussions of those relativities. More subtly though, this need to compare, going beyond methodological requirements, indicates to me how strong the comparative urge is, and how difficult is for more people than just me to maintain the extremely narrow focus of ethnography.

I also found the analysis of effect of the type of prompt useful,and the apparent connections between prompt-type and response-structure are promising for further investigation.

In summary, I found this article very useful as a starting point for thinking about a number of complex issues because the discussion was grounded in an analysis of practice,which is a context in which I feel comfortable. Overall, I doubt that it is a strong paper, and I expect to make more use in the long term, perhaps, of some of the works referenced. However, as a starting point, I would recommend it to anyone with a practical rather than a theoretical background.

References:

Uden, L. & Beaumont, C., Technology & Problem Based Learning, 2006, Information Science Publishing

Other references are from the bibliography of the subject article, which is:

“An analysis of higher order thinking in online discussions”, McLoughlin & Mynard, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, Vol. 46, no. 2, May 2009, p.147-160.