# Scaffolding and support for collaborative learning


[This
week](http://new.p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-the-field-of-computer-supported-co/content/wk-6-design-cont-scaffolding-affordances-scripting/)
in CSCL-intro, we read Puntambekar & Hubscher's
[[ref:puntambekar2002scaffolding|Scaffolding in complex learning
environments: What we have gained and what we have missed]]. We were
also supposed to read an article by Slotta, but that link seems to have
gone broken. The Puntambekar paper was a great read though, and a very
nice introduction to the idea of scaffolding.

**Historical background**

I have frequently heard the words scaffolding in connection with
[[Knowledge Forum]], and had some understanding of its current use, but
did not know about its history, or about some of the critiques of its
current use. Apparently "scaffolding" was first used about the
interaction between parent-child or teacher-student, related to
Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (I had heard about ZPD, but
never connected it with scaffolds).

At this point, scaffolds had several important features that seemed to
get lost in the move to group learning and automated scaffolding:

-   the shared understanding of the learning task by the adult and the
  child
-   the dialogic interaction between the two
-   the scaffold being adapted continually to fit the child's zone of
  proximal development
-   the adult being both a general facilitator and a domain-expert
-   the scaffold eventually fading away, and transferring the
  responsibility to the child

Both scaffolds (for construction) and support structures under arches
are proposed as metaphors in the article, but I wonder if support-wheels
for children learning to bike aren't more appropriate - they let you do
something you wouldn't be able to do otherwise, and practice other
skills, but it's a great day when you can take them off and go much
faster.

**Scaffolds in group learning**

CSCL is all about group learning, not the individual teacher-student
relationships (although much good can be said about that as well). In
larger groups, it becomes much harder to make the scaffold adapted to
each child, although some ways are suggested - one is to give the
individual learners more control over when to remove the scaffold (for
example by a button saying "Don't remind me about this anymore"), and
something called "learner models" are also mentioned. I read a few
articles about this - the idea is that given your interactions with the
computer, the computer develops an internal model of what you know, or
what your skills are, and is able to adapt the learning environment
based on this.

However, this latter is usually found in the literature on intelligent
tutors, which are not constructivist at all - something like Carnegie
Mellon's Open Learning Initiative, for example. I've always wondered if
it were possible to have learner models in a constructivist
collaborative setting.

I also wonder to what extent scaffolding and zone of proximal
development presumes an "encyclopedic" perspective on knowledge - given
that the adult is supposed to also be a domain expert, who leads the
child to the knowledge. This might not fit well with messy problems, but
I guess the adult can still model the kind of critical thinking and
inquiry that he/she wants the child to emulate, without necessarily
knowing all the answers the child will come up with?

**Scaffolding and scripting**

There are a number of words used frequently, which are often hard to
define. In many of the cases mentioned in this article, scaffolding
seems very similar to what I understand as "scripting" (especially when
Puntambekar says that the software can help with the "procedural
scaffolding" so that the adults can focus on the "cognitive
scaffolding").

Perhaps scripting is even defined as one kind of a scaffold, although
I've never seen that mentioned anywhere. I'll need to do more reading to
see. (I recently read Wecker, et al.'s [[ref:wecker2010scol|"S-COL: A
Copernican turn for the development of flexibly reusable collaboration
scripts"]], which was a nice introduction to scripting).

I also see the word *orchestration* used, and am not sure how that fits
in. Again, more reading required.

**Scaffolding in Knowledge Forum**

It's interesting to think about how scaffolding works in Knowledge
Forum, given the criticism raised in this article. Scaffolds are
definitively "one-size-fits-all", and there is no mechanisms for fading
them out, nor have I seen any mention in any of Scardamalia's articles
of a desire to gradually "wean" students off these scaffolds.

I wonder if there is a difference between scaffolds and things that
simply help you do your thinking better - for example, I could create a
template for notes on articles in my wiki, prompting me to answer
certain questions, etc. This could by some be described as a scaffold,
but I would have no strong need to "overcome it", and internalize it -
it's simply another knowledge management tool.

Many other interesting things brought up in this article too - the link
with Skinnerian behaviourism, the difference between peer-facilitation
and expert-facilitation, etc. I have already downloaded several of the
referenced articles.