1.6 Social Software and Communities of Inquiry

Various authors (eg, Palloff and Pratt, 1999; Russell and Ginsburg, 1999) have made explicit reference to the formation and sustenance of learning communities in conjunction with online learning.  In these latter studies, the focus has been less on individual learning, and more on the social nature of cognition and the making of meaning; as Zukas and Malcolm (2000) succinctly express it, “students and teachers are considered to be social and cultural actors with identities emerging from their wider social experiences”.

Recently, the term ‘social software’ has been coined to describe the means by which online communities and e-learning are initiated and mediated.  Social software has been defined as “any software which enables groups of people to communicate and to collaborate, and which exists for the benefit of the everyday non-specialist user…[it] supports and improves mainstream social practices, both offline and online” (Davies, 2003).

To this, Coates (2003) has added that social software augments collaborative activities by facilitating creative processes in groups, structuring the processes so as to have a distinct and productive end result.  This same facilitation of group processing addresses Roschelle’s (2003) caution that the over-complication of technology often results in the over-simplification of the social aspects of distributed wireless learning environments.

Garrison and Anderson (2003), have defined e-learning as “learning facilitated online through network technologies”.  They have identified three key elements of what Lipman (1991) has termed a ‘community of inquiry’ (characterized by him as an environment in which choice and a diversity of perspectives encourages higher-order thinking and learning).  These key elements are namely cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence.  

Briefly, social presence is “the ability of participants in a community of inquiry to project their full personality, socially and emotionally, through the medium of communication being used” (Garrison, Anderson and Archer , 2000); teaching presence is “the design, facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realising personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes” (Anderson et al , 2001); and cognitive presence is defined as “the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a community of inquiry” (Garrison, Anderson, and Archer, 2001).  The extent to which these three elements of a community of inquiry can be fostered through learning activities using text- and picture-messaging is a focus of the present research intervention.

Of particular relevance to the present study is cognitive presence.  Garrison, Anderson and Archer explain that cognitive presence is ‘operationalized’ by what they term the ‘practical inquiry model’.  In practical inquiry, there are four phases: namely a triggering event, in which teaching presence is employed to explicitly introduce an issue or problem, in terms of learning tasks, to the learners; exploration, in which the learners are required to understand the nature of the problem, and then move through the social exploration of ideas to a fuller exploration and subsequent selection of relevant information; integration, in which learners begin to assess the applicability of ideas in terms of how well they describe the issue; and finally resolution, in which learners work towards building a consensus.  It should be noted that these four stages of the practical inquiry model correspond very well to the respective stages in a Structured Academic Controversy.

In conclusion, Heidegger (1927) saw communication as the process by which ‘people share their sense that the world can be comprehended’, while Myerson (2001) reminds us that ‘without such communication, people will lose confidence in the possibility of understanding their experience of the world…education is all about supporting the feeling of intelligibility by opening out lines of communication’.

This chapter has situated the present study in the context of the nature of geography as essentially a spatial discipline, in general, and in the existing corpus of literature on cognitive mapping and spatial discourse, in particular.  Cognitive mapping and spatial discourse are critical to the study because its purpose is primarily to investigate the extent to which novice geographers’ spatial and mapping skills might be improved by participating in field interventions which focus explicitly on the surfacing, sharing and shaping of elements in the natural- and built-environments which novices find geographically meaningful.  In the next chapter, the theoretical underpinnings of the intervention will be discussed, and examples of similar work will be reviewed.

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