University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications
Document Type
Other
Publication Date
2012
Abstract
Addressing the conference theme of “design thinking,” this paper discusses an instructional design model, WisCom (Wisdom Communities) that we developed to build a wise learning community online, to solve open-ended, ill-structured problems such as solving a health crisis or an environmental disaster, which requires the exchange of multiple perspectives, inter-disciplinary thinking, creative problem solving, and social construction of knowledge. Based on socio-constructivist, sociocultural theories of learning and mediated cognition (Vygotsky, 1978), distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995; Pea, 1993), group cognition (Stahl, 2006), research on how people learn (Bransford, Vye, Bateman, Brophy, & Roselli, 2004), and distance education design principles (Moore & Kearsley, 2011), WisCom specifies three components that must be designed to create a wise community online that engages in creative problem solving and transformational learning: (1) a cohesive learning community involved in negotiation of meaning and collaborative learning; (2) knowledge innovation – moving the learning community from data, information, and knowledge to wisdom, providing opportunities for reflection, sharing of perspectives, knowledge construction and preservation within the community, and (3) learner support and e-mentoring to achieve the communities’ learning goals.
Publication Title
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Conference of the International Council of Educational Media
First Page
369
Last Page
379
Language (ISO)
English
Keywords
Wisdom communities, instructional design models, online learning, social constructivism, distributed learning, mentoring, knowledge innovation
Recommended Citation
Gunawardena, C. N., Layne, L. C., & Frechette, C. (2012). Designing wise communities that engage in creative problem solving: An analysis of an online design model. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Conference of the International Council of Educational Media (pp. 369-379).
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Comments
Preprint version.