USING CONCEPT MAPS IN LOLA – THE ON-LINE LEARNING LAB

O atual processo de desenvolvimento econômico mundial e suas conseqüências culturais e sociais têm criado uma necessidade de educação contínua e aprimoramento profissional cada vez maiores. Incentivada e desafiada por esse processo de globalização e evolução tecnológica, a pedagogia tem buscado facilitar o acesso à educação a todos os segmentos da sociedade pelo desenvolvimento de modelos novos e criativos que respondam à necessidade dessa nova sociedade. A educação on-line passa a ser uma alternativa possível, pois fazendo uso da Internet é possível recursos anteriormente inimagináveis. Objetivando ultrapassar o modelo de ensino/aprendizagem de reprodução e acumulação de conhecimento foi criado, em 2002, o LOLA – O Laboratório On-line de Aprendizagem. Essa proposta está sendo agora implementada pela inclusão da criação de Mapas Conceituais (CM) como estratégia de leitura e escrita. Baseada na teoria de aprendizagem significativa de Ausubel, a criação e interpretação de CM promovem a atividade dos dois lados do cérebro (analítico/racional e criativo/intuitivo) levando a altos níveis de cognição e comunicação. Nesse artigo, apresentamos as atividades do LOLA e como os CM foram incorporados à essa metodologia com alunos de Língua Inglesa originando o LAPLI – Laboratório de Aprendizado de Línguas – uma proposta metodológica para o ensino semi-presencial em ambiente virtual.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE
Aprendizagem colaborativa, ensino a distância, mapas conceituais

The world development model has been suffering profound alterations due to the process of globalisation of the economy and every transformational movement suggests processes of technological transition. Both developing and developed countries have been seeking to enable their people so that they can react to the demands and changes of the market, its products and processes.

Every professional needs and has the right to continue his / her process of education, keeping him / herself up-to-date, as now the knowledge acquired at school quickly becomes insufficient and obsolete. The meaningful appropriation of the existing information and production of new knowledge to meet the demands of environments that renew and prepare themselves to the future, lead BARCIA (2002, p.A12) to defend distance education as one of the most efficient answers for constant updating, a fundamental factor for economic development. In distance-learning professional improvement, the ability to read and understand and to produce new texts becomes a need in the building of knowledge in all areas of instruction.

“The On-line Learning Lab” LOLA was created to propose an answer to the demands of this new knowledge society and to overcome the models of accumulation and reproduction of information.

The goal of "The On-line Learning Lab" is to create opportunities for collaborative learning. In LOLA, the students (who work individually, in subgroups and in the larger group) collectively construct their knowledge by a constant exchange of information, points of view, questionnaires, solving and evaluating problems.

Collaboration between pairs allows for a unique and coherent production from the larger group, contributions coming from the activities of sub-groups as well as individuals, as all of them are shared by all the members of the class, by the publication of the activities.

These activities of LOLA both give sense to the groups work and at the same time make it dynamic. It is during the management of these activities that the members of the groups organise and interact between themselves, share roles, discuss ideas and positions, define sub-tasks; the whole proposal is elaborated, defined and negotiated collectively.

In LOLA, the pedagogical strategies are centred in the construction of knowledge and the collaboration between pairs or groups. This collaboration does not envisage a standardisation, as it respects the students’ individual identities because by sharing their different views they produce and grow together.

LOLA’s projection is made by an adaptation of the methodological approach created by BOCHNIAK (1998, p.45 and following), whose activities consolidate the strategy of her Learning Lab and her doctorate. This developed the Research Pedagogy that enables students, research teachers and schools to develop a critical learning philosophy so much in demand in today’s society.

This pedagogy is based on three principles that are to question the existing knowledge, answer these questions and evaluate – not the content of the questions and answers but the activities of questioning, answering and even evaluating. In 2002, it was complemented with activities made possible by the use of technology: links, commented reading and group article. It is LOLA’s activities, presented below, that allow the person to experience that rapture that is so much needed in the construction of knowledge.

The questioning of the existing knowledge implies in elaborating questions, related to the issues tackled in the course/discipline. These questions are published on-line, always trying to go beyond the reproduction of the existing knowledge. For this purpose, we suggest that students avoid formulating questions that are merely conceptual (using question words like “what”, “where”, “when”), as they do not lead to a reflexive activity and consequently, does not prepare each other to be a researcher. What we try to demonstrate by this activity is that questions that lead to interpretation (using “why” and “how”), summary, analysis, comparison and application, develop the attitude of research in both student and teacher.

This activity involves the exercise of answering the questions formulated and published on-line by the students. As in the Questioning Activity, this activity is sometimes performed in groups, sometimes individually, to allow the student to experience the two situations as they are completely different and equally enriching. When students work individually, they follow their own criteria. When they work in groups, they need to share their choice and negotiate meaning with the other members, thus practice their social skills.

In this exercise, two assumptions from Montessori´s Scientific Pedagogy are clear and interrelated: the assumptions of free choice and freedom with responsibility. In other words, students are free to choose which questions they will answer. However, they must answer the number of questions pre-established by the teacher.

The evaluation of the questioning, answering and evaluating procedures implies the development of an evaluation which focuses on the process. This activity is always developed in the big group, be it face-to-face, via videoconferencing or even by Chat, following what was already planned with the group. This process of evaluating always occurs after the questioning and answering activities, developed individually or in groups. The focus here is on the evaluation of the process, not of the product.

The activity “commenting on links” involves the exercise of searching the Internet for texts, articles, information and publish them with a comment, thus allowing the whole class to have access to different views of the same theme. This activity promotes the active construction of thought and the development of the students’ intellectual autonomy by the questioning and re-elaborating on existing knowledge, ensuring that they are able to produce knowledge. In this LOLA activity, once again the focus is not on the teacher but it is directed towards the group, who is made responsible for choosing the content to be discussed. In the traditional school, it is the teacher who selects the scientific truth to be presented to the students who then are expected to memorize what is presented. In the On-line lab, the content is selected for students by students, who perform an active, collaborative and reflexive role in the process of knowledge construction.

In this activity, students discuss in groups about texts selected by the teacher. Each group is responsible for reading one text which is discussed via Chat. After the discussion, one group has to elaborate and publish a few notes about the text, which then can receive comments from the other groups. In this collective process of critical analysis of the contents of the text, students exercise the management of heterogeneity (TORRES, 2002).

The group article is the exercise of constructing a text about a theme related to their course/discipline and publishing it in the virtual environment. In this exercise, the individual and the group mix all the time. The students’ personal universe also merges and a new universe is discovered by the group within LOLA.

From the first moment of the exercise, students exchange ideas in their group in order to choose the theme they will be writing about. This negotiation happens by chat or e-mail, i.e., in a synchronous or asynchronous way, depending on the means they choose to communicate. The members of the group have to overcome difficulties, conflicts, resistance and communication misunderstandings to produce knowledge collectively.

In the second moment of the exercise, students start writing the article. In this process, each member of the group writes his/her contributions that are forwarded to the other members, that complement, reject or add ideas. It is in this dialectical educational process, in which all members communicate with each other and act upon the text, that knowledge is produced.

It is possible to represent the dialogue for the construction of the text between the members of the group by the following diagram:

Each member of the group can interact with any other member, forming a communications network. All members of the group perform the role of writer, researcher, editor and critic (reviewer).

LOLA, described above, now receives contributions among which we highlight, in this article, the activity of building concept maps presented below.

The use of Concept Maps (CM) is a powerful learning technique, which is being utilized by many universities and organizations worldwide. It promotes meaningful learning and its benefit and use is being studied and stimulated in Brazil by universities like PUCRS, UFRGS, UFSC and PUCPR.

Including pictures or not, concepts are written in boxes which are organized in a hierarchical form – from top to bottom or from the centre to the sides – and are linked to each other by lines which include linkage words (like prepositions, verbs, linking words) that express the relationship between these concepts.

CM is based on Ausubel and Novak’s Meaningful Learning Theory (1963) and, as explained by Souza, "Meaningful Learning happens when new information is assimilated by a deliberate effort from the learner’s part in linking the new concept to relevant concepts or propositions already existent in his cognitive structure.” (SOUZA, 2003, translated by this author). In other words, the learner must wish to acquire new knowledge to be able to anchor it to previously assimilated concepts. By constructing maps, individuals use both sides of the brain (the analytical and the creative) at the same time, in an efficient way as they provide both a detailed and a general view of the subject being studied and encourage the solution of problems by new and creative ways (BUZAN, 2003).

This is an interesting technique to be used with mixed ability groups. Students who do not have much knowledge about the subject being studied or whose reading text is in a foreign language of which they have low-intermediate knowledge of, will tend to have more difficulty and therefore take longer to produce their maps which will be, in general, simpler, with fewer concepts and details, and fewer connections between the concepts. On the other hand, students who have more knowledge about the subject being discussed, produce more detailed maps, establishing more interconnections between the concepts and anchoring new propositions to previously acquired ones.

This experiment was developed with a class of university students taking English Language Pre-Intermediate II in the Languages Portuguese / English Course at the Catholic University in Curitiba, Brazil (PUCPR) from August to December 2003. The aim of the project was to develop English reading and writing skills in EFL with Intermediate level students using CM and the LOLA methodology in a hybrid course (50%-50%).

After inserting a link about a subject of their interest from the Languages Course (subjects chosen included “Educating Children with Autism”, “Bilingual Children” and “Teaching English with Technology” in the “Commenting on Links” activity, students chose one of those texts / articles / links to work on collaboratively, either individually or in groups, and developed the activities of “Questioning”, “Answering” and the “Creation of a Concept Map”. In the F2F (face-to-face) class, students were introduced to Concept Mapping (its benefits, uses and how to create them) by a PowerPoint presentation elaborated by the teacher, and in the following class – a distance learning class – students consulted sites on CM on the Internet and could download the PowerPoint presentation if they felt the need to do so. When they felt ready, they started producing the CM. These students had three challenges: to learn how to create the CM, to understand how to build a map as part of a hybrid course, and to create it as part of a collaborative activity, i.e., to help their colleague understand their chosen text. The maps were created using the tools available in the software Word, posing another challenge to them as it is not a software dedicated to creating concept maps like CMapTools. Their work is published on-line, in Eureka, PUCPR’s virtual learning environment.

Below you will find examples of students’ work from each of the three cycles of activities we had in that course:

In the maps shown above, we can clearly notice the students’ development in their understanding in how to make CM: in the second map, the concepts appear in boxes and in the third one the student has used linkage words. These maps were then reviewed by the students who inserted the links, and were used at the end of the cycle as a plan to write their articles from.

When asked about the usefulness of using concept maps as a reading and writing technique, students had a positive response, as illustrated below (translated by the author):

20/11/2003 17:50:05	Student 12	answer 2	2
They helped me when I needed to review some ideas. I was taken exactly to the part of the text that I needed.

20/11/2003 20:54:58	Student 8	Answer CM1	2
I like it because it helps us to understand linking words and to summarize the ideas we want to express.

20/11/2003 20:57:49	Student 19	CM_answer	2
As this was the first time we used CM, I can say that, at first, it would be more of a hinder than of a help. But, as time went on, I got used to it and I learnt how to use it. Today, I can say that it helps me understand the subject better and helps me to write better as well.

20/11/2003 20:59:37	Student 13	Answer	2
The construction of maps summarizes the main concepts of the text that we are working on and this helps when we are constructing our texts.

20/11/2003 21:12:10	Student 7	Answer_CM2	2
To construct a CM we need to work with the basic ideas of the text and if we need to write from these ideas/concepts we need to relate these key words establishing meaningful relationships between them and even discover new relationships that we might not have realised when we were reading the text but we came across when creating the CM.

We feel that the incorporation of Concept Maps into LOLA has been very successful and it can positively help the development of students’ reading and writing skills.

This methodology of including CM into LOLA forms part a Master’s Thesis on Technology in Education entitled “LAPLI – The Language Learning Lab – a methodological proposal for a hybrid course in a virtual environment” (publication due shortly).

The comprehension of what is read is fundamental when one is working with texts in a F2F or distance learning program. The inclusion of the activity to create concept maps into LOLA enriches this methodology as it offers a way to help students understand written texts and write individual and group articles and shows that, although distance learning is a methodological challenge, the possible pedagogical solutions are countless, especially when the aim is to overcome the paradigm of strictly individual work.

The pedagogical approaches that aim to attain Meaningful Learning through socializing encourage a greater exploration of technology mediated resources, specially those that promote the construction of knowledge and soften the physical and time distance that can be felt between interactive learners. So, the construction of knowledge, developed on-line according to the LOLA approach and complemented by the building of concept maps, leads us to a virtual integration, narrowing the gap between the agents in the learning-teaching process by the support given to the pedagogical communication. Some of the major difficulties in distance learning are then overcome: the use of practices that help in the comprehension of texts, the construction of group articles, the bridging of physical gaps between teacher and students, and, in the case of collaborative learning, the physical gap between the students themselves.

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USING CONCEPT MAPS IN LOLA – THE ON-LINE LEARNING LAB

ABRIL/2004