A practice scaffolding interactive platform

A Practice Scaffolding Interactive Platform (PracSIP) is a social learning platform which supports students in collaborative project based learning by simulating a professional practice. A PracSIP puts the core tools of the simulated practice at the students' disposal, it organizes collaboration, structures the students' activity, and interactively supports subject learning. A PracSIP facilitates students' development of complex competencies, and at the same time it supports the students' development of skills defined in the curriculum. The paper introduces the concept, presents the theoretical foundations, and gives an example of a PracSIP. Epistemic Frames and Epistemic Games: Simulating Practicum In their book Situated learning Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) developed the concept Community of practice, which was later to be subjected to further scrutiny by Wenger (2008/1998). A community of practice is a group of individuals participating in communal activity, and continuously creating their shared identity through engaging in and contributing to the practices of their communities and thereby developing a shared repertoire (Wenger, 2008). David W. Shaffer has worked with the concept in relation to computer based learning. He argues that different communities develop different epistemic frames, that is “[...] different ways of knowing, of deciding what is worth knowing, and of adding to the collective body of knowledge and understanding of community” (Shaffer, 2006, p. 10). Shaffer argues that well established professions like those of doctors, engineers, journalists, etc., each have a particular learning practice, or practicum. By simulating such a practicum an epistemic game makes it possible for students to learn to think like doctors, engineers, journalists, etc. That is, they learn to be a part of a particular community of practice. Hatfield and Shaffer (2006) define an epistemic game as consisting of “an activity structure (the things players do) and a computer-based epistemic game engine (the technology players use) which together simulate the process by which adults become fluent in a particular professional practice” (Hatfield & Shaffer, 2006). The examples given of epistemic games are often tools to support a certain subdivision of the practice. To give an example, Byline (Hatfield & Shaffer, 2006) supports writing newspaper articles in a certain way, but does not support the interviewing done before writing the article. Nor does the definition imply that an epistemic game engine organizes the collaboration of the players or structures their activities. The organization of the collaboration and activities might be the teachers' challenge; or it might be a task for the students themselves to find out how to act in the game setting. Practice Scaffolding Interactive Platforms: Simulating Practice A Practice Scaffolding Interactive Platform (abbreviated PracSIP) is a game engine or, in my words, an interactive platform which is intended to scaffold the full practice, and therefore includes tools for organizing collaboration and structuring students' activities. A PracSIP makes students able to simulate (parts of) the community of practice of a professional setting, and thereby helps them develop competencies which are important from an educational point of view. The case presented in this paper is a simulation of (parts of) the community of practice in a newspaper editorial office. The Editorial Office (in Danish: Redaktionen) is a PracSIP developed by the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet. The PracSIP builds on a concept paper written by the author of this paper in 2006. It supports many of the activities in a journalist’s practice, such as collaboration, planning, research, writing and layout. The students write and layout a newspaper which is then send to a printing office and printed in 4 or 8 pages in color in 1000 copies on real newsprint. The activity that develops around a PracSIP has a lot in common with project based learning (PBL). PBL is a constructivist pedagogic approach that attaches importance to the student’s autonomous interdisciplinary and collaborative work with the subject matter. There is evidence that project based learning can be successful and promote students deep and long-lasting learning (Barron, Schwartz, Vye, Moore, Petrosino, Zech et al., 1998, p. 272f.). But project based learning is not without problems: “[...] projects offer many attractive promises, but they are often difficult to implement” (Barron et al., 1998, p. 306; cf. Bundsgaard, 2005, ch. 5.3.4.3 and 10.1.4.5). The challenges can be summarized thus: 1) the challenge of chaotic social contexts (organization of collaboration), 2) the challenges of what to do next (structure of activity sequences), and 3) the challenge of promoting subject learning central to curriculum standards (support of subject learning). Some of the reasons for the challenges can be explained by taking a closer look into the theory of communities of practice. Etienne Wenger states three principles which characterize a community of practice. The members are bound together into a social entity through mutual engagement. Members are engaged in actions whose meaning they negotiate continuously. Joint negotiated enterprise is the participants’ “negotiated response to their situation [which] thus belongs to them in a very profound sense, in spite of all the forces and influences that are beyond their control” (Wenger, 2008, p. 77). The participants have a shared repertoire of resources: Words, ways of doing things, routines, actions, artifacts, styles, etc. (Wenger, 2008, p. 83). The last principle states that the participants have a shared repertoire of rules, steps in a process, knowledge of hierarchies, etc., which are often tacit and inscribed in the practice. Participants in a community of practice know the organization of practice; i.e. they know the rules of what shall, must or can be done by whom, at what time, where and how in relation to whom. When newcomers are introduced in the community, they get to know the shared repertoire by interacting with more experienced participants as legitimate peripheral participants (Lave & Wenger, 1991). But in a community of practice solely consisting of one more or less experienced participant (the teacher) and a number of newcomers, the repertoire of collaboration rules, communication strategies, process steps, etc., has to be introduced in other ways; preferably when it is needed by the individual newcomers, and in a way that makes the process run smoothly. When this fails, the social context is in danger of being chaotic, and the newcomers (the students) have problems finding out what to do next. For that reason the repertoire has to be more explicit, reified, when all participants are newcomers, but it still has to be presented in a way that does not overwhelm the students, making it difficult for them to figure out when to employ which parts of the repertoire. In more complex cases students therefore have to be supported as well in their collaboration as in their individual activity. A PracSIP therefore is an interactive platform that scaffolds both the students’ organization of collaboration and helps structure their activity. Parts of the repertoire (like artifacts, vocabulary, styles) require the students to be capable of doing, knowing, and handling. And some of these activities are central to the curriculum. A PracSIP therefore also integrates support of the students’ development of subject related competencies. Shaffer argues that epistemic frames help students see the world in a variety of ways, which are well aligned with the core skills, habits, and understandings of a postindustrial society (Shaffer, 2005). This argument is convincing, but some parts of an epistemic frame might be more relevant in an educational context than others. And some epistemic frames might make it possible to develop more generally relevant competencies. A journalism PracSIP, for instance, can support students in developing their competence of writing, which can be used in many other contexts. The design objectives therefore always have to be double. The developers of a PracSIP must analyze the structure of a reproductive practice (Shaffer, 2005), that is the epistemic frame of a profession, but they must also consider which parts of the profession that demand the most important competencies, and finally they must consider how to support the pedagogical practice to minimize chaos, and support student activity. These triple objectives are equally important, but not necessarily in line with what a professional himself would consider important, when developing a PracSIP. A central function in The Editorial Office, seen from an educational point of view, is the commentary tool which is intended to support and organize commenting on the first draft of the article. The reason for this tool is double. First it is a way of assuring better and more thoroughly revised texts in the final paper. And secondly it is a way of focusing on writing to improve the students writing competence and their reflections on their own and other students’ writing. From a journalistic point of view the tool is less important – on a newspaper the practice of giving article critique is often placed after the article has been printed. If the intention of the platform was only to simulate a journalism community of practice, the tool should have been left out. But the central role of writing in the simulated practice as well as in the formal curriculum necessitates focus on students’ writing competencies, and makes possible that they practice and reflect on writing in a context where they recognize the importance of producing a well-structured and well-formulated text that lives up to the genre and stylistic demands of a newspaper article. The core design principles of a PracSIP can be summed up thus: A PracSIP facilitates simulation of dimensions of an authentic community of practice, scaffolds the practice by organizing collaboration, structuring activities, and giving access to the core tools of the community of practice, and it supports development of competencies which can be transfered to other situations. These design principles appear to be in line with the four principles of design that Barron et al. (1998) propose, and which “can lead to doing with understanding rather than doing for the sake of doing” (Barron et al., 1998, p. 273). These principles are: 1) learning-appropriate goals, 2) scaffolds that support both student and teacher learning, 3) frequent opportunities for formative self-assessment and revision, and 4) social organization that promotes participation and result in a sense of agency (ibid.). The design principles are explicated in the following four sections.