Noticing, Understanding, and Encouraging Positive Engagement with Collaborative History Learning

Abstract

This study analyzes the implementation of Net.Create, a collaborative network analysis tool (Authors, 2018), in the context of a digital humanities classroom. Undergraduate students used network analysis to investigate historical objects gathered from the local community in a History Harvest. This paper focuses on the collaborative engagement of groups as they co-constructed conceptual frameworks in Net.Create to explain the individual, social, and cultural histories attached to these objects. Findings suggest that positive social engagement and metacognitive behaviors can support students’ sustained engagement with historical and network analysis ideas. Interwoven “on-topic” and “off-topic” social engagement in the data suggest that these forms of engagement can productively sustain engagement with cognitively demanding activities. Having built a supportive environment for collaboration amongst themselves, students were able to smoothly and effectively build on each other’s ideas to generate an understanding of historical and network analysis patterns in their data.