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Tech Report kmi-07-01 Abstract


Symmetrical support in FlashMeeting: a naturalistic study of live online peer-to-peer learning via software videoconferencing
Techreport ID: kmi-07-01
Date: 2007
Author(s): Peter Scott, Linda Castaņeda, Kevin Quick, Jon Linney
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This paper reports on a naturalistic study of peer-to-peer learning, in a live, online-video meeting context. Over a 6-month period a group of international students of animation attended 99 live, online study group events amounting to around 120 hours of live broadcast meeting time. Some meetings were very large, with up to 34 participants, but the average participation was 10 students. These events were entirely self-organized, policed and managed by the student community. Some students emerged as natural mentors, and the group exhibited substantial supportive, mutually facilitative roles. This longitudinal study provides concrete measures of the impact of simple, live videoconferencing in an online learning context. The study also shows that learners can provide symmetrical support for each other in a live non-formal, peer-learning context, even without a formal scaffold of lectures and seminars.

Publication(s):

Submitted to Computers and Education, October 2006
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Knowledge Management is...


Knowledge Management
Creating learning organisations hinges on managing knowledge at many levels. Knowledge can be provided by individuals or it can be created as a collective effort of a group working together towards a common goal, it can be situated as "war stories" or it can be generalised as guidelines, it can be described informally as comments in a natural language, pictures and technical drawings or it can be formalised as mathematical formulae and rules, it can be expressed explicitly or it can be tacit, embedded in the work product. The recipient of knowledge - the learner - can be an individual or a work group, professionals, university students, schoolchildren or informal communities of interest.
Our aim is to capture, analyse and organise knowledge, regardless of its origin and form and make it available to the learner when needed presented with the necessary context and in a form supporting the learning processes.