Kindle notes

While it may have been feasible to make progress on CSCL problems during the first decade of the field’s existence from exclusively within an educational psychology perspective or using an artificial intelligence approach, it is less likely now. (loc: 493-95)

We need theories of collaborative interaction that are not necessarily based on individual learning models. (loc: 499-500)

We need methodologies that capture both micro-level interactions in small groups and community-level developments as mediated by social practices and by technical infrastructures. (loc: 501-2)

The role of technology is conceptualized as mediation by affordances of artifacts, which exist within socio-cultural contexts, influenced by relatively stable large-scale factors. (loc: 540-42)

It suggests that technologies like the Internet cannot be treated as simple artifacts, but form infrastructures at a meso level that mediate between people and social structures. Infrastructures are not objects with attributes, but are enacted in use in ways that help to evolve social edifices. Their relational character implies that design of CSCL technologies and interventions can only be indirect, establishing preconditions for educational opportunities, but not causally determining learning outcomes. (loc: 542-46)

The CSCL approach recommends collaborative learning arrangements and points to the potential of a broad variety of digital media and artifacts to enhance the group knowledge building. (loc: 587-89)

3. Co-reflection and Narrative Analysis The power of detailed analysis is illustrated in the paper by Yukawa. Using narrative analysis, she gets at the nature of collaboration between two adult students and their teacher, who communicated online via off-the-shelf technologies. The article presents the concept of co-reflection, showing both its tacit and explicit forms, as well as its cognitive and affective facets. This analysis of co-reflection locates individual reflection, made visible in shared narrative, as a part of group cognition. Conversely, it brings to the fore characteristics of the group interaction that have previously gone unnoted, emphasizing, for instance, the roles of metaphor and interpersonal relationship. (loc: 640-46)

Could be useful for ptopu course (loc: 646)

5. A Generic Framework for Chat Last issue’s investigation of techniques for overcoming problems of the chat medium by Fuks, et al. suggested the need to carefully design synchronous media for collaborative learning. Now, Lonchamp provides a framework for systematically considering alternative features to include in synchronous support under different conditions. The framework is designed to model systems that are flexible and can be tailored to a wide range of users, communities, goals and contexts. (loc: 652-56)

intersubjective meaning making as the most appropriate object of analysis for CSCL as a unique and important science. It suggests that “intersubjective meaning making” is a more productive term than “collaborative learning,” which is only visible indirectly and retroactively. Such a focus has implications both for the design of technology support and for the synthesis of multiple methodologies. (loc: 686-89)

The second contribution looks at how anchoring can aid technologies for intersubjective meaning making. (loc: 691-92)

the advantages and disadvantages of situating online postings about a document in the presence of that document, as compared to a generic discussion forum in which postings cannot directly reference locations within the discussed object. Issues of grounding and situating discourse are often investigated by looking closely at detailed cases; here quantitative measures can confirm hypotheses arising from such cases across a larger corpus of online textual interaction. (loc: 693-96)

However, close attention to specific utterances showed that the students constructed their own ways of interacting and learning, often in opposition to the structures, hypotheses and measurements of the experiment. (loc: 702-3)

This paper, however, enriches the depth of the analysis by carefully combining SNA with other quantitative and qualitative methods. (loc: 710-11)

Unfortunately the theory of situated learning is too often construed as a questionable assumption of communities-of-practice everywhere, or as an antiquated romanticizing of apprenticeship. (loc: 721-22)

Individual learning may take countless forms and can be analyzed in terms of the manifold theories of psychology and education; it is highly dependent upon mental conceptions, personal attitudes, modes of content presentation, etc. Learning that takes place in small groups, however, relies additionally upon the establishment of patterns of interaction to guide communication and to support coordination of the group. (loc: 725-28)

When collaborative learning is computer-supported, the need for the group to adopt effective social practices is both more necessary and more complicated. The subtle social cues of intonation, gesture, facial expression, body language, etc. that have accompanied human social life for millennia may be missing in virtual contexts. As people struggle to interact through awkward computer interfaces, they need to adapt accustomed social practices to the deficits and affordances of the technology, the objective of their activity and the constraints of their interpersonal relationships. (loc: 728-32)

how software can be designed to support both monological and dialogical learning in concert by opening interaction spaces that help students to move between individual work and group practices. (loc: 739-40)

By carefully studying interaction excerpts from CSCL settings, the authors conclude not only that individual contributions are essential to dialog as the interanimation of multiple perspectives, but also that individual cognition should be considered as involving social practices of interaction. (loc: 740-42)

Using both coding-and-counting and discourse analysis, the authors find that the students do succeed in explaining their work to each other and comparing different solution paths. (loc: 750-51)

Clouder and colleagues explore the dynamics of blended learning, how social practices change as groups of students move back and forth between face-to-face and distance interaction. (loc: 754-55)

They stress the pivotal role of the tutor in orchestrating the sequence of phases and the corresponding group dynamics. In keeping with other educational research, they indicate that blended learning has advantages over both face-to-face and distance by themselves. (loc: 756-58)

establishment of consistent social practices to support synchronous interaction without visual contact. (loc: 763-64)

they suggest a specific form of CSCL, where the term “collaborative” is specified as referring to collaboration that is “community-based” in the sense of CoPs providing socio-cultural contexts in which collaborative learning can take place. They illustrate community-based learning related to the university and related to what in the USA are known as non-profit organizations and elsewhere as non-governmental organizations (NGOs). By publishing these articles, we bring considerations from CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) and HCI (human-computer interaction) into the CSCL discussion. (loc: 857-61)

distinguishing networks of practice and communities of interest from CoPs as variants. (loc: 863)

Here, a community is not only learning via computer-supported media, but they are also learning about how to design and use computer-supported “community-based” learning technology. (loc: 864-66)

how residential research universities can develop unique and attractive approaches to computer-supported community-based learning by involving students in real-world research in academic labs and local industry. (loc: 867-68)

Carroll & Faroque propose a middle layer of theoretical constructs they call frameworks, which mediate between general patterns and individual cases. (loc: 869-70)

They draw on the idea of design patterns (loc: 872)

Meier, Spada & Rummel differentiate as many as nine dimensions of interaction for quantitative analysis and assessment. They derived these through an interesting combination of bottom-up qualitative content analysis with generalization, refined through top-down theory-informed considerations. Operationalized for reliable application, these dimensions are then used to develop and successfully apply a rating scheme for assessing the quality of computer-supported collaboration processes among dyads of college students engaged in videoconferencing. It is suggested that such a ranking approach has advantages over coding for many research questions, still allowing a quantitative comparison of alternative conditions. A quite similar interest drives the paper by De Laat, Lally, Lipponen & Simons. They are interested in synthesizing and extending the understanding of patterns of collaboration in the context of networked learning or CSCL. They start with a general overview of the utility of social network analysis (SNA) in social science and in previous CSCL studies. Then they bring in content analysis and critical event recall as complementary tools. Their paper provides an additional example of the usability of SNA. (loc: 885-94)

the paper by Rourke & Kanuka argues explicitly for a qualitative approach as a way of gaining deeper insight into important CSCL phenomena. Much CSCL research aims to support discourse that stimulates critical thinking and even argumentation; much CSCL literature also bemoans the common failure of online discourse to achieve high levels of critical reflection, often using quantitative measures based upon coding, ranking or SNA, for instance. This paper adopts a “naturalistic paradigm” in which “realities are multiple, constructed and holistic … so that it is impossible to distinguish causes from effects.” It inquires into the life contexts of several students in an in-depth case study of online learning in order to explore the manifold and subtle barriers that mitigate against the ideal of online critical discourse. Thereby, one catches a glimpse of personal factors that influence the diverse ways that individual students interact to co-construct reality, course materials and understandings of each other—factors that might well slip through the sieves of methods that aggregate data for the sake of generalized findings. (loc: 895-903)

The online discourse is coded and quantitatively compared to highlight different interaction patterns. One group used more co-text and course material in their discussion while the other referred more to personal experiences. Quantifying the data provided a valuable tool to measure and contrast knowledge construction in these groups. Complementing this, a detailed qualitative analysis of the groups’ discussions and thick descriptions of the relations between the specific thematic content, communicative functions and contextual resources provided insight into reasons behind the similarities and differences. The paper includes both the coding scheme and extended excerpts from the group postings and their analysis, helping the reader to understand and evaluate the claims made. The combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis illuminates the situated and mediated nature of learning in the case studied. (loc: 946-52)

It is a CSCL environment that supports groups of students to work and learn together—something unusual for intelligent tutoring systems. The system provides a careful balance of supports for individual and group work, based on the CSCL literature. (loc: 958-60)

‘Computer-Supported Scripting of Interaction in Collaborative Learning Environments’ (loc: 973-74)

a review of the current state of the art of scripting and a framework for the specification of scripts, including a proposed standardization of terminology. Collaboration scripts aim to foster collaborative learning in shaping the way in which learners interact with one another. In specifying a sequence of learning activities, together with appropriate roles for the learners, collaboration scripts are designed to trigger engagement in social and cognitive activities that would otherwise occur rarely or not at all. (loc: 979-83)

The framework enables a description of collaboration scripts using a small number of components (participants, activities, roles, resources and groups) and mechanisms (task distribution, group formation and sequencing). (loc: 984-85)

Their discussions were scripted by assigning four students in each group to well-defined collaboration roles: ‘moderator’, ‘theoretician’, ‘summarizer’, and ‘source searcher’. By focusing on communication and coordination, the primary targets of the script instructions were interactions within the group rather than cognitive processes of individuals. The authors conclude from their detailed statistical analysis that the use of collaboration roles has the potential for improving knowledge construction. (loc: 988-92)

In part of the experiment, an overall positive effect of role assignment was detected. All students in the experimental condition outperformed the students in the control group without role assignment. Nevertheless, the study revealed that not all roles equally promote knowledge construction for the individuals who have to perform that specific role. It appeared that students in some roles were confined by their role and did not participate as well in the ongoing discussion. This points to the danger of over-scripting during collaborative interaction. (loc: 992-96)

An argumentation perspective exposes how learning in group settings can be accomplished by participants’ critical analysis of claims and interpretations through dialectic processes. (loc: 998-99)

two instructional strategies for using argument graphs: as a means for debate, in which students interact through both chat and argumentation graph tools, and as a tool for representing debate, in which students interacted through chat and then transcribe their discussion to an argumentation graph. (loc: 1020-22)

Students who used the graphs as a means for debate tended to express more personal opinions, elaborating on argumentation (reasons); while students using the graph to represent debate sought to express the consensus of a “group voice,” and elaborated more on causes and consequences. Thus, the paper illustrates the bidirectional influence of tool on argumentation and argumentation on tool. (loc: 1023-26)

The concept of a group voice plays an important role (loc: 1026-27)

from experimental to analytic methodologies in design-based research. (loc: 1027-28)

a direction in education that values collaboration over individuation and dialogic reasoning over thinking skills, (loc: 1028-29)

evaluation methods that most appropriately reflect these values. (loc: 1029-30)

compared pre- and post-session essays on quantitative measures of argument structure such as the number of claims and reasons given, finding no differences. Recognizing that these structural measures are not criteria for the educational objectives they care about, the authors then analyzed the essays for openness, decisiveness and coherence, finding significant differences. Furthermore, the authors undertook a discursive analysis of students’ argumentative dialogues to understand how these improvements came about. Schwarz & De Groot conclude that as students sought to find collective truth in a group voice, they became less motivated to produce “more arguments at any price,” and hence numeric frequencies of the constituents of arguments fail to capture the educational outcomes that were of greatest importance to both researchers and students. (loc: 1033-39)

Imagine a group of our prehistoric ancestors sitting around the tribal fire sharing their narratives and perspectives on the world. Cautiously, a youthful utterance emerges from beneath the adult voices to query, “Why do you always speak of the eternal fire? I see only a succession of burning logs.” Haltingly, the elders try to explain that while it is true that there could be no fire without the logs, none of the individual logs could burn the way they do if they were not part of the fire, which endures much longer than any of the logs in it. A second youth nods with her friend’s question; she is also confused and stares into the glowing fire before her. She throws a new log onto the fire and observes it closely. Her log starts to smoke where it is lapped by surrounding flames. Suddenly, a flame flashes out of it. Soon, the tribal fire is brightest right around her log. She gestures to her friend, saying, “Look at that: the log would not have burned at all if not for the fire, and the fire would not be so excited without the contribution of my log and without the way that my log and the other logs enflame each other.” The two youngsters turn to their elders and ask, “How are we to understand this interplay of log and fire defining each other, which cannot easily be spoken of in our language?” The elders pause wisely and face the warmth of the flames. Eventually one holds his palms out to the source of warmth and is moved to say, “We can understand the fire by measuring the heat that it gives off and we can understand the nature of different logs by measuring how long they burn in the fire.” Then another perspective comes to word: “We should look in great detail at how the log and the fire interact, how the logs catch fire and the fire endures.” Another position is voiced that argues that the fire is the important thing for the tribe and that one should understand its phases—how it ebbs and flows like the moon or the tides; how it first catches from a spark in kindling, then roars across timbers and finally glows with embers. Then another claims that the fire really is nothing but the sum of individual logs burning and that a true understanding must simply know how each of the different woods of the forest burns; from such knowledge one can predict how any collection of logs will burn. Yet another voice points out that the tribal fire is a special fire. It is situated in the village center, in a pit whose shape and orientation both shelters and fans the flames. It is watched over and cared for by the villagers, who depend upon it for their survival. It is a gift of the gods, which has been entrusted to the people and passed down through the generations. As the fire dies down for the night, the two youngsters dose off, comforted by the wisdom of their tribe, which is somehow more than the simple sum of the opinions of individual elders. (loc: 1061-82)

three primary social levels on which learning, interaction and knowledge building can take place: that of the individual student, the small workgroup and the class as a whole (including the teacher). An effective script not only works on a given level, but more importantly relates the activities at each level to each other to form an effective integrated pedagogical process. (loc: 1174-77)

Collaboration, they argue, takes place most effectively in a relatively unconstrained small group process of peers working together to overcome some cognitive barrier to the shared accomplishment of a joint task. In order to set up the groups oriented to their tasks and to introduce the barriers without interfering with the self-directed nature of small-group collaboration, a script specifies how to form small groups and organize tasks while operating on the teacher-centered classroom level, and then “split when interaction should happen” (SWISH) onto the small-group level. Following the collaboration phase, the script then specifies individual- and class-level activities to share, solidify and internalize the knowledge building that took place in the groups. (loc: 1177-82)

students and teachers often focus on procedural learning and minimize the conceptual learning that was intended by the curriculum designers. (loc: 1187-88)

mediating tools at three social levels intersected in the concrete situation of this classroom: the school as curriculum deliverer, the knowledge domain (high school genetics) and the computer tool (a website with the table and the 3-D virtual world environment). Although the teacher and students enacted the joint task and their collaborative priorities together as a small group, they were situated in a context that included the institutional constraints of the school, the conceptualizations of the domain of biology and the pedagogical design embedded in the software. Without taking these multiple levels of constraints into account, one cannot expect CSCL activities to succeed in inspiring students with deep insights into contemporary understandings of genetics and other sciences. (loc: 1196-1201)

The typical levels within CSCL interventions according to Dillenbourg & Hong are: individual, small group and class. The analyses of these and other levels by Krange & Ludvigsen and by Nett are qualitative. It is also possible to conduct quantitative analyses of processes at these levels and of the interplay between levels. Ulrike Cress argues for the importance of conducting such studies and provides an in-depth introduction to a statistical method for analyzing the results. Multilevel analysis (MLM)—or hierarchical linear modeling (HLM)—is becoming increasingly popular in CSCL and related research, but is relatively complicated to conduct. It allows one to do regression analysis when individual subjects are nested in groups, as is usually the case in collaborative learning. If one tests individual students before and after some group activity, then the learning that may have taken place could be a function of the skills, backgrounds and efforts of the individuals, but it could also be a function of the interactions that took place within the groups. For instance, if one wants to test whether girls learned more than boys, that comparison would be confounded by whether each of the girls or boys was in a good group or a bad group. MLM separates out the effects at different levels and reports how much of the variance is due to individual effects and how much to group effects. In order to do this, understandably but unfortunately, MLM requires larger sample sizes than are common in CSCL studies. Cress addresses this and other issues for adapting MLM to CSCL. (loc: 1212-23)

Approaches like cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström, 1999), actor-network theory (Latour, 2007) and situated learning (Lave, 1991) sketch their union in general terms. (loc: 1274-75)

one accepts Vygotsky’s (1930/1978) principle that distinctively human cognitive skills are developed in groups (socially, inter-subjectively) first and only subsequently on that basis internalized into mental (individual, inner-subjective) abilities, then one can pose the fundamental CSCL question: How can technology be used to facilitate this intersubjective-to-individual process of collaborative learning? (loc: 1277-80)

One must create and coordinate: (i) a group knowledge-building space, (ii) a set of individuals engaged as a group and (iii) channels of interaction between the social and personal systems. Structuration theory (Giddens, 1984) generalizes the relationship between these levels, stating that each of us as individuals with our identities are products of socialization processes within a society (loc: 1281-83)

thinking about an evolving Wikipedia article as a communication system in interaction with the people who write and edit it. The individual authors are also conceptualized as systems, although in their cases as cognitive systems. (loc: 1290-91)

Piaget’s seminal view of equilibration to characterize the interactions between systems. (loc: 1292)

Luhman’s systems theory, (loc: 1295)

Many people who analyze group processes in CSCL settings come up with the idea of feeding a representation of the processes back to the participants to guide their behavior. (loc: 1298-99)

how computer-mediated (loc: 1301)

how computer-mediated group discussion influences individual conclusions. (loc: 1301-2)

Since its beginnings in the aftermath of fascism, social psychology has been critical of group cognition. It tends to emphasize negative possibilities of peer pressure, group-think and mob mentality rather than exploring how collaboration can be guided to positive outcomes. In this paper, the authors show how well-designed feedback can provide such guidance—e.g., by having participants rate the novelty of postings in order to increase the salience of minority views. (loc: 1304-7)

how annotations can spark critical thought about a text. (loc: 1311-12)

Anchored annotations—where reader comments are placed visually adjacent to referenced textual sources—have often been recommended by CSCL researchers. Here the author compares different annotation styles in lab settings. Her findings are reminiscent of Piaget’s concept of assimilation, where suggestions contrary to one’s opinions stimulate critical reflection. She argues that annotations can be most effective in fostering reconsideration of one’s opinions if the annotations are not only anchored but also selectively filtered to display just a couple of postings, representing conflicting perspectives. (loc: 1312-16)

Theories of CSCL have often focused on the discourse of student groups and their possible modes of participation in this discourse as definitive of collaborative learning. (loc: 1414-15)

contemporary theorists define their approaches in terms of dialog, communication and interaction. (loc: 1417-18)

Research methods in CSCL tend to focus on the analysis of traces of communication and other indicators of participation in discourse in order to study phenomena of collaboration and to assess effectiveness of computational supports. Researchers often complain that such analysis is time-consuming and tedious, wishing that computers could take over some of this burden. (loc: 1419-22)

As part of his critique of behaviorism, Vygotsky showed how higher human responses to a primary stimulus are mediated by a secondary stimulus, such as a symbol or tool. He also analyzed how mediating stimuli can be internalized in the individual’s mind. When looking at collective behavior, like that in a school classroom, it is useful to broaden the conception of dual stimulation to include such phenomena as small-group tasks and institutional practices or technological media. This introduces concern with the complex relations that exist among agents, tasks, and tools in CSCL settings. The tensions, affordances, and constraints involved in the co-design of pedagogical tasks and collaboration media raise the need for social practices of appropriation, negotiation, and adaptation by students, teachers, and administrators at the levels of individual, small-group and community activities. (loc: 1515-21)

Gijsbert Erkens and Jeroen Janssen describe a system to help assign codes to utterances in chat logs. (loc: 1540)

It looks for keyword or key-phrase “markers” in single utterances in order to assign one of about 30 codes from a particular coding scheme that distinguishes argumentative, responsive, informative, elicitative and imperative utterances. The authors have developed a rule-production system of 300 rules for segmentation and 1,250 rules for selecting codes. (loc: 1542-44)

Diana Laurillard provides a theoretical framework for distinguishing instructionist, social, constructionist and collaborative learning—whether computer-supported or (loc: 1596-98)

They confirm their earlier finding that Indian high school students who were in groups that failed to solve ill-structured physics problems later outperformed students who had been in groups that succeeded in solving well-structured problems. Failure in collaborative group knowledge building had a paradoxically positive learning effect in the longer run. (loc: 1612-15)

From a Vygotskian perspective, this is not so surprising. Challenging ill-structured problems carefully selected in the zone of proximal development of the students provided an opportunity for the groups to develop problem-solving skills that the individual group members could subsequently internalize, individualize, or make their own during posttests. The fact that these were purely peer groups—unlike in Vygotsky’s examples—accounts for the fact that they did not fully succeed in the purposefully out-of-reach goal, but they nevertheless forged significant steps in working on the problem. (loc: 1615-19)

To support such research, the paper extends and demonstrates the use of connective ethnography in an online setting. (loc: 1630-31)

Annika Lantz-Andersson shows how students working in a CSCL environment may attribute their problems to the technology rather than to their own work. The example nicely demonstrates the complexity of assigning agency when interacting with an educational software system. (loc: 1647-49)

Affordances are the features of an artifact or of a communication medium that determine what one can do with them. For instance, an important affordance analyzed in the VMT environment was persistence. Unlike most audio and video media, the text- and graphics-based VMT components retained inscriptions for later viewing and reference. This was consequential for the ability of students to explain their postings and activities to each other, and thereby to establish a basis of collaborative activity. The chat, whiteboard, and wiki components each had subtly different forms of persistence, as the analysis pointed out by describing how the group took advantage of these affordances. (loc: 1712-17)

proposes that affordances not be considered objective properties of artifacts independent of the people who use them. Rather, affordances are relative to the “interaction potential” of the people who see and make use of the artifacts. The term “interaction potential” is not restricted to a person’s current “knowledge in the head or in the world” (Norman, 1990). Rather, it is related to the analysis of “body schema” developed by the premier French phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002). The potential that someone—or some group or some community—has to interact with a given artifact is a function of their lifelong engaged being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 1927/1996). (loc: 1720-26)

Interestingly, this article applies Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of embodiment to the virtual world, in which actors are largely disembodied. For instance, students in a CSCL environment do not see each other as embodied presences and they do not touch or physically manipulate the objects that they share on their screens of pixels. Here the term “interaction potential” takes on a different sense. It is not a matter of Merleau-Ponty’s embeddedness in the physical world, but of interaction in a new sense, whose affordances must now be analyzed. Space, time, and causation in the virtual world are designed affordances, different from those in the physical world of bodily being. (loc: 1727-31)

When CSCL researchers analyze the results of student discourse in these media, they are often disappointed, as the early studies of Hakkarainen (see below) illustrate. Students tend to engage in informal socializing, sharing of unsubstantiated personal opinions, joking, and posting statements of little intellectual depth. Why do students make such use of technology that was designed by researchers to support collaborative knowledge building and intended by teachers to promote critical inquiry practices? According to this article, it is because the students enact the affordances of the new technology in accordance with the communication genres of the past. (loc: 1739-43)

If one looks carefully at the genre of the student communication in threaded discussion forums, one sees the characteristics of the epistle or personal letter, rather than that of scholarly argumentation. While email is formatted along the lines of a business memo, brief postings in threaded discussion or SMS chat tend to adopt the genre of informal social conversation and personal letters. This is what students are used to, based on our cultural heritage. To change the practices of computer-mediated interaction to a form more akin to genres of logical deduction and scientific conjectures or refutations, requires training the students in new practices, not merely providing digital media. The affordances of the technologies are to be found not in the plans of the programmers or instructors, but in the practices of the users. (loc: 1744-50)

The “trialogical” framework of the K-P Labs Project instead distinguishes the individual, collaborative, and object-oriented aspects. This shifts the focus for the third aspect from the agents—in any configuration—to the knowledge object. This emphasis is familiar from activity theory, where the activity system in a workplace is strongly oriented toward the goals to be achieved and artifacts to be produced. In a classroom setting, it calls for a focus of students, project groups, and classes on the systematic improvement of ideas and other knowledge objects. Accordingly, collaborative learning pedagogies provide for student groups to engage in critical inquiry around open-ended questions so they will develop the skills needed to develop (locally) new knowledge about ill-structured problems. Using a well-developed coding scheme for analyzing knowledge-creation practices (or the lack thereof), this article explores the kinds of problems that students have when faced with enacting their own knowledge-creation practices. Just as seen in the previous article, students tend to stick with their accustomed genres of practice, sharing opinions more than building on shared knowledge objects. Becoming knowledge-creating learners requires the development of specific metaskills, as detailed in the article. (loc: 1758-68)

Peter Reimann proposes an event-centered approach as an alternative to conventional variable-centered methodologies for analyzing the processes that unfold over extended periods of time in CSCL settings. He argues that tracking events can be more responsive to changing circumstances than plotting values of presumably fixed variables. Furthermore, event-centered analysis can account for a richer range of causality and a broader spectrum of reporting, including narratives. (loc: 1879-82)

conversation analysis, uptake diagrams, and thick descriptions, (loc: 1884-85)

He first clarifies the often-confused terminology of alternative theories of learning, and then operationalizes his distinctions within a coding scheme, applied to the work of four groups in a classroom. He clearly distinguishes “knowledge creation”—as the community improvement of ideas—from a naïve realist transmission model of “knowledge sharing” and a cognitive psychology constructionist model of “knowledge construction.” His coding scheme is able to distinguish the differential ability of the student groups to engage in knowledge creation through their work in Knowledge Forum. A look at the decisive codes is suggestive of pedagogical issues to consider in promoting knowledge creation. (loc: 1891-96)

the theoretical tension between knowledge sharing (as an acquisitionist or transmission model of learning) and knowledge construction (as a participationist or social model). Building on her recently published analysis of affordances (Dohn, 2009), the author clearly lays out the challenges posed by trying to adopt Web 2.0 technologies (wikis, blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Second Life, etc.) for educational purposes in university courses. (loc: 1924-27)

For knowledge to be shared, it is necessary that the participants can see the same thing in the same way. In the two previous articles, this was an important, but implicit principle. The wiki and the virtual reality were designed to create shared perceptual spaces, where salient objects could be seen by all. (loc: 2034-37)

Figure 1 is an attempt to visualize major categories of these influences. It places at the center the dialogical interaction through which individual participants form into a collective knowledge-building agency. Figure 1. A diagram of major influences on group cognition. (loc: 2220-24)

In addition, theories of situativity, activity, ethnomethodology, actor networks, and distributed cognition highlight the essential influences on collaboration of the ongoing interactional context, the teleological object of the activity, available conceptual tools, established social practices, immutable-mobile mediators, the evolving joint problem space, and the larger socio-cultural horizon. (loc: 2236-39)

In contrast, CSCL settings typically involve processes (cognitive, knowledge-building, interactional, or identity-forming) at the small-group and/or classroom level of description, as well as at the individual student level. Processes at these different levels interpenetrate with each other intimately, without being reducible to any one level. In addition, CSCL involves mediation of the learning, interaction, and cognition by technological artifacts and computational media. To capture these processes and mediations, (loc: 2319-22)

The interactive whiteboard, for instance, acting as a location for focusing shared attention on the group task, as a referential center for exploratory talk, as an external memory, common ground, or indexical source for group cognition, and as a visual foundation for group identity demonstrates useful functionality for computer support of collaborative knowledge building. (loc: 2338-40)