Abstract:

The abrupt move to remote education during the Covid-19 pandemic required University students to take responsibility for their own learning and adapt to new technologies, practices and environments. In this collaborative autoethnography, we capture the experiences of three students in coming together through collaborative design in a knowledge building environment to support and elevate each other over the course of twelve weeks. In this article, we discuss how our identity as design thinkers was characterized, understood, and enacted in a knowledge building community through idea improvement. We further reflect on the role of small group processes on idea development and knowledge advancement, both for the individual students and for the learning community as a whole. The analysis presented has implications for the development of students’ knowledge-building practices and to better understand how design can play a role in promoting knowledge-building in an online environment.

Personal Reflexive Statements:
- Author 1: This paper will analyze my own journey through an online collaborative project with a small design group. It will use the theoretical foundations of knowledge building to consider how that journey was shaped by being a member of the group as well as by my own understanding of the project we worked on. As a teacher I began with questions about how it could become possible to effectively implement the use of Knowledge Forum software in a classroom with high school aged students.
- Author 2: This paper concretizes my desire to preserve the ideas and experiences of growing as an “idea designer” in a learning community. Having been introduced to the principles of knowledge building in a previous course, I came in with predefined goals for this course. My design would focus on sustainable idea growth through the use of analytics. However, as my thinking became more deliberate and conscious through continued interactions with my design group, my goals found new directions.
- Author 3: This paper will describe and give context to my experience learning about knowledge communities and knowledge building for the first time, and how this fit in with my other studies and interests in knowledge management, design thinking and knowledge media design. Specifically, it was surprising to me how much knowledge building draws on design thinking concepts, which I’ve explored in great detail in user-experience courses and used as a tool for group workshop facilitation.

Together:
Idea-centric, theory-informed iterative design has been a discursive process of dialogue and self‐reflection for each of us forcing a deliberate, revelatory online conversation regarding :
1) what we have learnt and unlearnt from this design process, and
(2) to what extent it can serve as an artifact that could impact students in future knowledge building communities.

Keywords:

Online learning, design thinking, knowledge building, collaborative inquiry.