ICLS 2000 Proceedings

Relation-Making to Sense-Making: Supporting College Students' Constructive Understanding with an Enriched Collaborative Note-Sharing System

Naomi Miyake & Hiroyuki Masukawa
School of Computer and Cognitive Sciences
Chukyo University
Toyota, 470-0393, Japan
Tel: 81-565-45-0971, Fax: 81-565-46-1296
Email: nmiyake@sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp, masukawa@grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp

Abstract: We report here a case of university level collaborative learning supported by a note-sharing system called Reflective Collaboration Note or ReCoNote. The system is enriched with the mutual linking capability that requires the learners to explicitly think about and comment on relationships between two pieces of information. In a course on human problem solving the students first studied and reported some classical problem solving literature. The students are then asked to make relations among their presentations by utilizing ReCoNote's mutual linking function, and report to the class the linkages they made. In the third phase, a report on the characteristics of humans as problem-solving systems was required as the summary activity. The log data analyses reveal that the students visited other groups' notes often and as the course develops, links spread from within one's own group's notes to cover notes created by other members belonging to other study topics. Students who actively used the system tended to turn in high-quality summaries. The system has been used in three half-year classes and the initial analyses of the activities have revealed that this mutual linking did in fact help the learners learn rather complicated topics in cognitive science.

Keywords: cognitive science, higher education, learning environments, reflection

Preferred Citation Format:
Miyake, N., & Masukawa, H.. (2000). Relation-Making to Sense-Making: Supporting College Students' Constructive Understanding with an Enriched Collaborative Note-Sharing System. In B. Fishman & S. O'Connor-Divelbiss (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the Learning Sciences (pp. 41-47). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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