Collaborative Learning and its Benefits

Collaborative Learning : -

The concept of collaborative learning is the grouping and pairing of students for the purpose of achieving an academic goal. The term "cooperative learning" refers to an instruction method in which students at various performance levels work together in small groups toward a common goal.

44 Benefits of Collaborative Learning : -

1. Develops higher level thinking skills
2. Promotes student-faculty interaction and familiarity
3. Increases student retention
4. Builds self esteem in students
5. Enhances student satisfaction with the learning experience
6. Promotes a positive attitude toward the subject matter
7. Develops oral communication skills
8. Develops social interaction skills
9. Promotes positive race relations
10. Creates an environment of active, involved, exploratory learning
11. Uses a team approach to problem solving while maintaining individual accountability
12. Encourages diversity understanding
13. Encourages student responsibility for learning
14. Involves students in developing curriculum and class procedures
15. Students explore alternate problem solutions in a safe environment
16. Stimulates critical thinking and helps students clarify ideas through discussion and debate
17. Enhances self management skills
18. Fits in well with the constructivist approach
19. Establishs an atmosphere of cooperation and helping schoolwide
20. Students develop responsibility for each other
21. Builds more positive heterogeneous relationships
22. Encourages alternate student assessment techniques
23. Fosters and develops interpersonal relationships
24. Modelling problem solving techniques by students' peers
25. Students are taught how to criticize ideas, not people
26. Sets high expectations for students and teachers
27. Promotes higher achievement and class attendance .
28. Students stay on task more and are less disruptive
29. Greater ability of students to view situations from others' perspectives (development of empathy)
30. Creates a stronger social support system
31. Creates a more positive attitude toward teachers, principals and other school personnel by students and creates a more positive attitude by teachers toward their students
32. Addresses learning style differences among students
33. Promotes innovation in teaching and classroom techniques
34. Classroom anxiety is significantly reduced
35. Test anxiety is significantly reduced
36. Classroom resembles real life social and employment situations
37. Students practice modeling societal and work related roles
38. CL is synergystic with writing across the curriculum
39. CL activities can be used to personalize large lecture classes
40. Skill building and practice can be enhanced and made less tedious through CL activities in and out of class.
41. CL activities promote social and academic relationships well beyond the classroom and individual course
42. CL processes create environments where students can practice building leadership skills.
    

Constructivism, a theory of building Knowledge

Constructivism is the construction of new understanding as a combination of prior learning, new information, and readiness to learn. Individuals make choices about what new ideas to accept and how to fit them into their established views of the world.

In a Constructivist Classroom...

Student autonomy and initiative are accepted and encouraged.

By respecting students' ideas and encouraging independent thinking, teachers help students attain their own intellectual identity. Students who frame questions and issues and then go about analyzing and answering them take responsibility for their own learning and become problem solvers.

The teacher asks open-ended questions and allows wait time for responses.

Reflective thought takes time and is often built on others' ideas and comments. The ways teachers ask questions and the ways students respond will structure the success of student inquiry.

Higher-level thinking is encouraged.

The constructivist teacher challenges students to reach beyond the simple factual response. He encourages students to connect and summarize concepts by analyzing, predicting, justifying, and defending their ideas.

Students are engaged in dialogue with the teacher and with each other.

Social discourse helps students change or reinforce their ideas. If they have the chance to present what they think and hear others' ideas, students can build a personal knowledge base that they understand. Only when they feel comfortable enough to express their ideas will meaningful classroom dialogue occur.

Students are engaged in experiences that challenge hypotheses and encourage discussion.

When allowed to make predictions, students often generate varying hypotheses about natural phenomena. The constructivist teacher provides ample opportunities for students to test their hypotheses, especially through group discussion of concrete experiences.

The class uses raw data, primary sources, manipulatives, physical, and interactive materials.

The constructivist approach involves students in real-world possibilities, then helps them generate the abstractions that bind phenomena together.

Software Requirement Specification

1. Functionality

2. External Interfaces

3. Performance

4. Attributes

5. Design Constraints

Compare two different conceptual maps

why compare two different conceptual maps???

Students are given some preliminary information such as a list of concepts, or an initial arrangement of concepts. This is often the case in classroom examples, where concept maps are used to assess student learning about a particular subject.
To compare different maps we counts levels of hierarchy, matches corresponding hierarchical clusters, and automatically identifies cross-links would be useful for concept map evaluation.

In comparison of two conceptual maps we…………

Evaluates the skeleton of the concept maps, asking only whether the concepts are connected to one another in the same way

Focuses on the agreement of the linking proposition used to define the relationship between each matching pair of concepts

Up to what degree the concepts, links and directionality of relations match

For teachers who want to see how their students are doing, this allows quite an efficient way to do it. As different students have different way of thinking to understand the logic of specific knowledge, the teacher can easily see her students’ progress, strengths and weaknesses and can help her in future studies.

Problem: Graph to tree conversion

I have found one algorithm which convert graphs into trees like structures:

The link of that algorithm is:

http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/content-model.html

Infact this algorithm convert "RDF graph" which is the sameone as "concept maps" to trees.

So we dont re-invent new algorithm for the conversion of graphs to trees, because the main part of my work is to build the concept maps application on the table top that students can build and collaborate with each other.

How to convert conceptual maps into trees

Problem::

From the point of view of the matching task, the biggest problem is how to convert the conceptual maps into trees for semantic matching!

Project Specfication

PROJECT SPECFICATION

Background Information

"Without the cooperation of its members society cannot survive, and the society of man has survived because the cooperativeness of its members made survival possible.... It was not an advantageous individual here and there who did so, but the group. In human societies the individuals who are most likely to survive are those who are best enabled to do so by their group."
(Ashley Montagu)

Cooperative learning is one of the best researched of all teaching strategies. The results show that students who have opportunities to work collaboratively, learn faster and more efficiently, have greater retention, and feel more positive about the learning experience.

Joseph Novak, a Cornell University professor who developed the idea in the 1960’s about Conceptual mapping. Conceptual maps are visual representation of graph like structure that used by the teachers to allow the children represents the knowledge consists of concepts and the relationship between them. These maps are hierarchical like structures.

In the Concept Mapping process, the first step is the identification of the problem, after identification the focus question are identifying and listing the most important or “general” concepts that are associated with the topic, ordering the concepts from top to bottom in the mapping field, means that the general concepts are on the top in the hierarchy and less general are at the bottom of tree. Then adding and labeling linking phrases. Once the preliminary Concept has been built, cross-links are identified and added, and a review of the map for completeness and correctness is performed.

Motivation for the Project

The motivation of this project is to facilitate the development of tabletop application that allows a group of students or more to cooperatively develop conceptual maps which containing all necessary features of collaboration and knowledge sharing. The new system will bring all necessary functions for the students to collaboratively interact with each other on a tabletop to build concept maps

Project Goals and Scope

The goal of this project is develop a Tabletop application in “C #” and “Microsoft s wpf (Windows Presentation Foundation). The application allows a group of students or more to cooperatively develop conceptual maps on the tabletop. The developed application will provide different features to the students to create, edit, and delete concept maps on the tabletop.

How Results must be evaluated

When the application of tabletop will be ready, we will take different tests with the group of students in order to check that up to what extent they will create concept maps on tabletop.

Related Works

There are lot of research going on about the collaborative management of digital maps. Like TabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape andsize, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.The first case of study has been tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach.