Abstract:

It is argued that online networked discussion forums are making it much easier for people to engage in informal, social, group-based learning due to providing "the means to create, find, organize and share resources, and participate in networks and communities with a shared learning focus or interest" (Gruzd et al., 2016, p. 49). It is assumed that learning can be seen as an act of active participation in communities of shared culture and practice (Ito et al., 2013), in participatory cultures, where people "collectively and individually make decisions that have an impact on their shared experience" (Jenkins et al., 2016).

In this paper, the methodology used to unpack dialogues to find learning in a public Facebook group will be accounted for. Online informal learning, in general, cannot be fully compared with collaborative learning in educational contexts, but there are similarities in the way meaning is made and in how it may be identified, especially when people collaborate in online discussions. The choice of methodology was inspired by studies where the authors developed coding frames to find markers for Learning analytics in online discussions that focused on finding linguistic cues for learning. In this study, a coding frame was used based on the framework for productive dialogues that focus on how people "use language to think together when pursuing joint problem solving and other learning activities" (Mercer & Littleton, 2007, 54).

Research on productive and exploratory talk combined with research on online communities where people collectively engage in meaningful participation (e.g., Ito et al., 2013; 2018; Jenkins et al., 2016) guided the unpacking of the creation and sharing of meaning in the empirical setting. This provided a "representation of dialogue data and their construction in research and learning contexts’"(Knight & Littleton, 2015, 112) and also identified the "constructive interaction that reflects adult, collaborative learning most likely to advance both individual and group knowledge"(Haythornthwaite et al., 2018, 222f).

Full conversations were first analyzed for exploratory elements with a Qualitative Content Analysis. This was done by evaluating existing concept-driven categories (Schreier, 2014) used in previous research (Ferguson et al., 2013; Haythornthwaite et al., 2018) and complementing them with data-driven categories to fit the discourse. The categorization of exploratory dialogue was done based on the co-occurrence of exploratory elements within a thread. An analysis of the sharing of knowledge, ideas, and resources was then done on a selection of threads, following how "content, function and shared understanding is developed in social context over time" (Mercer, 2010, p. 9).

By using this methodology, it was possible to explore how the members of the community built social ties through community work when engaging in collaborative problem-solving activities, idea development, and working together to build a common understanding. Learning in the empirical setting is described as done for the benefit of the community and through negotiating one’s own ideas in relation to others. This is similar to how learning is described in research on computer-supported collaborative learning (c.f. Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2010) and connected learning (c.f. Ito et al., 2013, 2018).

Keywords:

Methodology, exploratory dialogue, online learning, social media.