# Knowledge building: theory, pedagogy and technology


![](http://webkf.fse.ulaval.ca:8080/image/knowledge_forum_panel.jpg)In
[week
4](http://new.p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-the-field-of-computer-supported-co/content/wk-4-knowledge-building/)
of [CSCL-intro](http://bit.ly/cscl-intro), we are talking about
Knowledge Building, and the first paper is
[[ref:scardamalia2006knowledge|Knowledge building: theory, pedagogy and
technology]] by Scardamalia and Bereiter. I have read a number of their
papers before, and have quite a bit of experience with Knowledge Forum,
the platform that they developed (I also made [a
screencast](http://vimeo.com/17143638) to demonstrate how Knowledge
Forum works, and can be used in a university class). This was a good
opportunity to read the paper closely, taking
[[ref:scardamalia2006knowledge|very detailed notes]], and look at some
of the questions I still have.

**Integrative learning and science**

One of the key ideas behind KB for me, is the difference between
cumulative and [[ref:scardamalia2006knowledge\#integrative|integrative]]
artefacts. Scardamalia refers to literature reviews that scientists
produce, and this reminds me of the initial OLNet proposal, which [I
blogged about three years
ago](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/08/01/very-exciting-new-initiative-to-organize-research-around-open-education/).
Later, she discusses the similarities between knowledge building
discourse, and
[[ref:scardamalia2006knowledge\#relationship\_between\_learning\_and\_work|knowledge
work in professional communities]]. She states that:

> In scientific and scholarly research teams, knowledge building often
> proceeds with no special technology to support it. This is possible
> because knowledge building is woven into the social fabric of the
> group and in a sense all the technology used by the group supports it.

However, I wonder why she doesn't spend more attention on how
professionals can improve their knowledge work. CSCL has a
sister-discipline in Computer-Supported Collaborative Work, which has
spent a lot of time looking at ways to improve for example knowledge
management in companies and organizations. Scardamalia posits the
scientific discourse as some kind of ideal, and there is no doubt that
it is powerful, but there is currently a whole lot of very exciting work
centered around improving the collaboration for scientists -- things
like open notebook science, wikis, social networks for citation sharing,
linking datasets, etc.

When I go to the [IKIT website](http://ikit.org/resources.html) and see
a list of more than 150 publications, I wonder if there isn't a better
way in which the knowledge could be presented. I would love to see a
wiki on Knowledge Building, where I could click on "scaffolds", and I
would instantly see "the state of knowledge for the community" about
scaffolds, the different definitions, the different ways of using them,
the different research projects that have used them, and "we still need
to understand"... What are the open questions in Knowledge Building
research? What are the challenges that the community grapples with? How
does new research "fit in" with what exists?

**Pedagogy**

Scardamalia doesn't write [[ref:scardamalia2006knowledge\#pedagogy|much
about pedagogy]] in this article, although she refers to a few other
articles (which I'd like to read in the future), however I've both taken
one of her classes, and observed/heard about some of the primary school
classes. I know that she does not want to provide any "blueprints" for
how to run a class, however I think this makes it very difficult for
people to adopt these principles. She mentions that working with
Knowledge Forum should not be the only activity in the class, they might
go on excursions, do experiments, etc. In practice, one of the things I
observed in the primary school classroom was "knowledge talks", where
the teacher would project a Knowledge Forum database on the wall, and
talk through it with the kids, the database being their "shared
artifact" that they can refer to in their discussions.

I am quite fascinated by this interplay between asynchronous individual
(although in practice the students often sit in groups typing in
messages to the computer, for some of the small kids, the teachers also
help them) activity and synchronous group activity. How do you best
structure a "knowledge talk" to help with the productive discourse? If
you run an online class, could this be replaced by a meeting in Big Blue
Button, or on Etherpad? (Of course, it would loose the facility of
easily pointing to nodes, and saying "I think this one was very
useful").

**![](http://vdc.cet.edu/images/image001DP11.jpg)The Knowledge Forum
environment**

It's pretty much impossible to discuss Knowledge Building without
mentioning Knowledge Forum, the platform which was formerly called
CSILE, and which has formed the center-piece of Scardamalia's research
for the last 25 years. While there is no doubt that this environment has
been very useful, enabling a lot of experimentation, especially in the
early days when there was nothing else like it, I feel like this
single-minded focus on Knowledge Building has held the theory back. Not
only because the environment is not freely available (although an open
source modernized version might be coming out), but also because the
theory should apply much more broadly, and I think trying to foster
Knowledge Building using different environments would also enrich the
theory.

Many of the Knowledge Building papers complain about threaded
discussions, but today we have so many more environments, from wikis to
twitter, to blogs with pingback and comments, RSS feeds, aggregators,
etc. (I discussed with Monica whether we could make a plugin for
WordPress that provided a similar "scaffold" with "My theory is", "We
still need to understand", "This explains", etc. Wouldn't be very hard
technically). And as we will see next with with Dan Suther, there are
actually a number of other graphical discourse environments with subtly
different characteristics. The only paper I know of, which tries to
foster a Knowledge Building environment with two environments
is [Duke-Williams and
King](http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~kingt/research/OUTLINE%20PAPER-v7.pdf),
who compare the use of Elgg with Knowledge Forum. And Konrad Glogowski,
who was a doctoral student with Scardamalia, wrote [amazing
posts](http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/2007/07/30/instructional-scaffolding/)
about using blogs with his students, although I don't think he was
trying to foster traditional Knowledge Building.

Stian