Developing cultural capacity for innovation is an educational imperative. The challenge in schools is to foster a culture of sustained, creative work with ideas, as in out-of-school Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) and cyberteams that self-organize to create knowledge. In this study, we examined the online knowledge work of three Knowledge Building classes, where young students assumed collective responsibility for creating and improving their community knowledge. We adopted the COIN concept of rotating leadership to visualize collective responsibility for knowledge advancement. Using a mixed methods approach, we conducted social and temporal network analyses, then content analyses of student notes to further assess cases of student leadership. Overall, we found relatively decentralized student networks, with most students leading the group at different points in time; when leading, students were connecting unique ideas to the larger class discussion. We discuss our findings within the context of designing embedded, transformative assessment for knowledge building communities.

1. Community Knowledge, Collective
Responsibility: The Emergence of
Rotating Leadership in Three
Knowledge Building Communities
Leanne Ma, Yoshiaki Matsuzawa, Bodong Chen, &
Marlene Scardamalia
Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology
ICLS2016| Singapore| June 19

2. Education for Innovation
(Sawyer, 2006; 2009)
• Manager-driven
• Hierarchical
• Linear, sequential
• Non-linear, emergent
• Decentralized
• Community-driven
• Learning, creativity, and innovation are central for
effective community and social engagement,
participatory democracy, and for living fulfilling
meaningful lives (OECD, 2008)
TOP DOWN
BOTTOM UP

3. Knowledge Building
(Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014)
• Is the creation of knowledge of value to the
community and involves
for the advancement of ideas
– Authentic, diverse, improvable ideas
– Community knowledge, collective responsibility
– Democratizing knowledge, symmetric advances
– Epistemic agency

4. Collaborative Innovation Network
(Gloor, 2006)
• Is cyberteam of self-motivated people who
collaborate to achieve shared goals and make
their vision a reality
• Honest signals for communication,
collaboration, innovation
– as indicator of group
creativity (e.g.,Gloor et. al., 2003; Kidane & Gloor, 2007)

5. Assessing Knowledge Building
• Portfolios (e.g., van Aalst & Chan, 2007)
• Social network analysis (e.g., Philip, 2010)
• Lexical analysis (e.g., Hong, Scardamalia, Messina, & Teo, 2015)
NEED for integrating social, semantic, and
temporal network analyses to understand
emergent community dynamics of KBC
Measuring via

6. CURRENT STUDY

7. Research Questions
1. At the group level, what does rotating
leadership look like in the Knowledge Building
class? How many students emerge as leaders
over the course of the inquiry?
– Temporal network analysis
2. At the individual level, what is happening when
a student is leading? How are they contributing
to the group discourse?
– Content analysis

8. Research Context
• Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study
• Data collected in Knowledge Forum
• Data analyzed in Knowledge Building
Discourse Explorer (KBDeX)

9. Knowledge Forum
(Scardamalia, 2004)
OVERVIEW

13. KBDeX
(Oshima, Oshima, & Matsuzawa, 2012)
OVERVIEW

14. KBDeX
Student notes

15. KBDeX
Student network

16. KBDeX
Word network

17. KBDeX
Note network

18. RESULTS

19. Research Questions
1. At the group level, what does rotating
leadership look like in the Knowledge Building
class? How many students emerge as leaders
over the course of the inquiry?
– Temporal network analysis

20. Case 1: Grade 4 – Light

21. Case 2: Grade 4 – Rocks

22. Case 3: Grade 1 – Water

23. Research Questions
2. At the individual level, what is happening
when a student is leading? How are they
contributing to the group discourse?
– Content analysis

24. Case 3: Grade 1 – Water

25. Case 3: Student Network

26. Case 3: Note Network

27. Case 3: Word Network

28. IMPLICATIONS

29. Summary
appears to be an
emergent phenomenon in KB communities
• Student leaders introduced new ideas to
and/or synthesized existing ideas in the
community discourse
– Coherence with KB principles
– Coherence between KB and COIN theory

30. Future Directions
• Teaching and assessment practices in KBCs
– Which classroom configurations support emergence,
self-organization, and rotating leadership?
– How can rotating leadership be sustained in order to
support continual idea improvement and pervasive
Knowledge Building in the classroom?
– How can rotating leadership be used for group- and
individual-level assessment?

32. Each generation must define afresh the nature,
direction, and aims of education to assure such
freedom and rationality as can be attained for a
future generation… It is in this sense that
education is in constant process of invention.
(Bruner, 1966)