Scaffolded Help for Learning: How Experts Collaboratively Support Newcomer Participation in Online Communities
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Online communities, often in the form of discussion forums, encapsulate the very notion of "doing good with technology" by serving as a conduit for help-seeking and problem-solving by users who volunteer their time and effort. One form of helping is assisting others with learning new content, an under-examined topic within the context of online communities, and in this paper we present a study investigating how online discussion forums go beyond informational support and guide newcomers' learning. We analyzed a forum dedicated to helping newcomers learn the programming language Java™. Using an empirical approach that combined analysis of forum data with interviews with expert we found that experts consciously and collaboratively scaffolded newcomers' learning by creating shared understanding, providing ongoing diagnosis, and fading their help over time. Multiple resources were leveraged for scaffolding and learners often received personalized instruction through collaborative contributions of multiple experts on the forum.
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Number of citations to item: 6
- Katerina Cerna, Claudia Müller, Dave Randall, Martin Hunker (2022): Situated Scaffolding for Sustainable Participatory Design, In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction GROUP(6), doi:10.1145/3492831
- Michael Prilla, Oliver Blunk, Irene-Angelica Chounta (2020): How Does Collaborative Reflection Unfold in Online Communities? An Analysis of Two Data Sets, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 6(29), doi:10.1007/s10606-020-09382-0
- Corey Brian Jackson, Carsten Østerlund, Kevin Crowston, Mahboobeh Harandi, Laura Trouille (2020): Shifting forms of Engagement: Volunteer Learning in Online Citizen Science, In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction CSCW1(4), doi:10.1145/3392841
- Aditya Johri, Aayushi Hingle Collier, Brent K. Jesiek, Russell Korte, Stephen Cory Brozina (2024): Workplace Learning Ecology of Software Engineers and Implications for Teaching and Learning, In: 2024 36th International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T), doi:10.1109/cseet62301.2024.10663014
- Habib Karbasian, Aditya Johri (2020): Insights for Curriculum Development, In: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, doi:10.1145/3328778.3366817
- Bushra Chowdhury, Aditya Johri, Dennis Kafura, Vinod Lohani (2019): Be Constructive: Learning Computational Thinking Using Scratch™ Online Community, In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-35758-0_5