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|Words for Better Thinking
| 11 May 2015 | Sebastian Feller
I am currently reading Sir Ken Robinson’s new book Creative Schools, which came out last month under Penguin Random House. Robinson gives an inspiring overview of how educators transform learners into self-directed, creative and engaged discoverers, who explore and change the world through an open mind and with brilliant ideas.
The question I asked myself was: how can we use language to trigger this kind of discovery based learning? Some intriguing research in this direction comes from the London Metropolitan University in London. Here Andrew Ravenscroft developed a new type of learner chat, the Digital Dialogue Game (DDG). The DDG works like other electronic chats. The users communicate via real-time text messaging. They type their message into a text box and send the message via mouse click to a chat window that is visible to all chat users. On top of the regular chat features, the DDG offers dialog act buttons and sentence openers. The dialog act buttons stand for different speech act types the user should choose from like “giving information”, “proposing an idea”, “supporting an idea”, and “agreeing”, to name a few. Once the user clicks on a dialog act button, a window with correlating sentence openers pops up. If the user chooses, for example, “proposing an idea”, the window might contain phrases like “I think that...”, “Maybe it is the case that...”, or “I believe that...”. Ravenscroft’s research has shown that this type of meta-cognitive scaffolding facilitates learners’ conceptual understanding and creative thinking. (If you are interested, check it out here!)
To return to Ken Robinson’s vision for the education world, the DDG meets many of the requirements for more learner-centered, self-directed learning environments. The DDG requires active participation from all of its users. Each user is given a choice in what he or she contributes. And most importantly, the DDG can easily be integrated into project-based learning. You want your learners to get a better grasp on politics? Why not let them indulge in a political role-play discussion using the DDG. You want them to learn programming? Have them discuss their programming projects on the DDG. Or how about getting feedback on how you are coming across as a teacher? What keeps you from starting up a constructive feedback discussion on the DDG?
It really strikes me that the DDG, in all its simplicity, can provide us with a seemingly endless array of possibilities for learner-centered education. In the same way, it is somewhat marvelous to see what a handful of words can do in terms of thinking and creativity. There might be an interesting link to the embodied cognition hypothesis: in a way, meta-cognitive expressions might be understood through a sort of cognitive simulation of the “actions” they refer to. I thus might interpret expressions like “I believe” by “simulating” a particular instance of me believing that something is the case. This, on the other hand, might make things a bit more vivid to me, thus enhancing my understanding. Seems to be a good question for future research in this area. Anyone interested in exploring it? Let me know. I am definitely keen to do something here.
Long story short: if you have the chance to try the DDG idea out, give it a go. And do not forget to tell us about how it played out for you. The comment section is wide open. On a side note: I often wish that this kind of chat was available for many of the meetings I sit in on my job. I am sure that a bit of meta-cognitive reflection would add some creative flavor to some of the more bitter bits. I am afraid that until then I will have to press the mental mute button. Cheers!
Tags: skill-based, project-based, learning, dialogue, meta-cognitive, chat, Digital Dialogue Game