Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is an emerging branch of the learning sciences concerned with studying how people can learn together with the help of computers. As we will see in this essay, such a simple statement conceals considerable complexity. The interplay of learning with technology turns out to be quite intricate. The inclusion of collaboration, computer mediation and distance education has problematized the very notion of learning and called into question prevailing assumptions about how to study it. Like many active fields of scientific research, CSCL has a complex relationship to established disciplines, evolves in ways that are hard to pinpoint and includes important contributions that seem incompatible. The field of CSCL has a long history of controversy about its theory, methods and definition. Furthermore, it is important to view CSCL as a vision of what may be possible with computers and of what kinds of research should be conducted, rather than as an established body of broadly accepted laboratory and classroom practices. We will start from some popular understandings of the issues of CSCL and gradually reveal its more complex nature. We will review CSCL’s historical development and offer our perspective on its future. p. 1

Second, online teaching requires at least as much effort by human teachers as classroom teaching. Not only must the teacher prepare materials and make them available by computer, the teacher must motivate and guide each student, through on-going interaction and a sense of social presence. While online teaching allows students from around the world to participate and allows teachers to work from any place with Internet connectivity, it generally significantly increases the teacher effort per student. p. 2

Is this always the case? With all kinds of students, settings? There are clearly environments in which students are learning actively themselves. If this is universally true, P2PU cannot work. Or perhaps P2PU can only work for a small select group of people? p. 2

The study of group learning began long before CSCL. Since at least the 1960s, before the advent of networked personal computers, there was considerable investigation of cooperative learning by education researchers. Research on small groups has an even longer history within social psychology. To distinguish CSCL from this earlier investigation of group learning, it is useful to draw a distinction between cooperative and collaborative learning. In a detailed discussion of this distinction, Dillenbourg (1999a) defined the distinction roughly as follows: p. 2

Collaboration is "synchronous"? The difference between cooperation and collaboration seems to be defined too much by a simple linear view of problem solving. What about a knowledge community that iterates over issues - we can split up tasks, recombine them, work sometimes apart and sometimes together. Granularities of collaboration. p. 3

In cooperation, partners split the work, solve sub-tasks individually and then assemble the partial results into the final output. In collaboration, partners do the work ‘together.’ (p. 8) He then referred to Roschelle & Teasley’s (1995) definition of collaboration: This chapter presents a case study intended to exemplify the use of a computer as a cognitive tool for learning that occurs socially. We investigate a particularly important kind of social activity, the collaborative construction of new problem solving knowledge. Collaboration is a process by which individuals negotiate and share meanings relevant to the problem-solving task at hand…. Collaboration is a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem. (p. 70, emphasis added) p. 3

If one is researching learning, this is a significant contrast. In cooperation, the learning is done by individuals, who then contribute their individual results and present the collection of individual results as their group product. Learning in cooperative groups is viewed as something that takes place individually—and can therefore be studied with the traditional conceptualizations and methods of educational and psychological research. p. 3

By contrast, in the Roschelle & Teasley characterization of collaboration, learning occurs socially as the collaborative construction of knowledge. Of course, individuals are involved in this as members of the group, but the activities that they engage in are not individual-learning activities, but group interactions like negotiation and sharing. The participants do not go off to do things individually, but remain engaged with a shared task that is constructed and maintained by and for the group as such. The collaborative negotiation and social sharing of group meanings— phenomena central to collaboration—cannot be studied with traditional psychological methods. p. 3

As we have just seen, collaborative learning involves individuals as group members, but also involves phenomena like the negotiation and sharing of meanings—including the construction and maintenance of shared conceptions of tasks—that are accomplished interactively in group processes. Collaborative learning involves individual learning, but is not reducible to it. The relationship between viewing collaborative learning as a group process versus as an aggregation of individual change is a tension at the heart of CSCL. p. 3

Earlier studies of learning in groups treated learning as a fundamentally individual process. The fact that the individuals worked in groups was treated as a contextual variable that influenced the individual learning. In CSCL, by contrast, learning is also analyzed as a group process; analysis of learning at both the individual and the group unit of analysis is necessary. This is what makes CSCL methodologically unique, as we shall see later in this essay. p. 3

Three early projects—the ENFI Project at Gallaudet University, the CSILE project at the University of Toronto, and the Fifth Dimension Project at the University of California San Diego—were forerunners for what was later to emerge as the field of CSCL. All three involved explorations of the use of technology to improve learning related to literacy. The ENFI Project produced some of the earliest examples of programs for computer-aided composition or “CSCWriting” (Bruce & Rubin, 1993; Gruber, Peyton, & Bruce, 1995). Students who attend Gallaudet are deaf or hearing impaired; many such students enter college with deficiencies in their written-communication skills. The goal of the ENFI Project was to engage students in writing in new ways: to introduce them to the idea of writing with a ‘voice’ and writing with an audience in mind. The technologies developed, though advanced for the time, might seem rudimentary by today’s standards. Special classrooms were constructed in which desks with computers were arranged in a circle. Software resembling today’s chat programs was developed to enable the students and their instructor to conduct textually-mediated discussions. The technology in the ENFI project was designed to support a new form of meaning-making by providing a new medium for textual communication. p. 4

Like the ENFI Project, CSILE sought to make writing more meaningful by engaging students in joint text production. The texts produced in each case were quite different, however. The ENFI texts were conversational; they were produced spontaneously and were generally not preserved beyond the completion of a class. CSILE texts, on the other hand, were archival, like conventional scholarly literatures. p. 4

As was the case for CSILE, the Fifth Dimension (5thD) Project began with an interest in improving reading skills (Cole, 1996). It started with an after-school program organized by Cole and colleagues at Rockefeller University. When the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) moved to UCSD, the 5thD was elaborated into an integrated system of mostly computer-based activities selected to enhance students’ skills for reading and problem solving. The “Maze,” a board-game type layout with different rooms representing specific activities, was introduced as a mechanism for marking student progress and coordinating participation with the 5thD. Student work was supported by more-skilled peers and by undergraduate volunteers from the School of Education. The program was originally implemented at four sites in San Diego, but was eventually expanded to multiple sites around the world (Nicolopoulou & Cole, 1993). p. 4

Four of the most influential monographs are: Newman, Griffin, and Cole (1989) The Construction Zone, Bruffee (1993) Collaborative Learning, Crook (1994) Computers and the Collaborative Experience of Learning, and Bereiter (2002) Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age. p. 5

The field of CSCL can be contrasted with earlier approaches to using computers in education. Koschmann (1996a) identified the following historical sequence of approaches: (a) computer- assisted instruction, (b) intelligent tutoring systems, © Logo as Latin, (d) CSCL. p. 5

The shift to the group unit of analysis coincided with a focus on the community as the agent of situated learning (Lave, 1991) or collaborative knowledge building (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991). But it also called for the elaboration of a social theory of mind, such as Vygotsky (1930/1978) had begun to outline, which could clarify the relation of individual learners to collaborative learning in groups or communities. p. 7

Collaboration is primarily conceptualized as a process of shared meaning construction. The meaning making is not assumed to be an expression of mental representations of the individual participants, but is an interactional achievement. Meaning making can be analyzed as taking place across sequences of utterances or messages from multiple participants. The meaning is not attributable to individual utterances of individual students because the meaning typically depends upon indexical references to the shared situation, elliptical references to previous utterances and projective preferences for future utterances (Stahl, 2006). p. 8

In the past, educational researchers have treated learning as a purely psychological phenomenon. Learning is seen to have three essential features: First, it represents a response to and recording of experience. Second, learning is always treated as a change that occurs over time. Finally, learning is generally seen as a process not available to direct inspection (Koschmann, 2002b). p. 9

dialogical theories of learning (e.g., Hicks, 1996) p. 9

Dialogical theories locate learning in the emergent development of meaning within social interaction. p. 9

The question of how intersubjectivity is accomplished has been taken up in a variety of specialized disciplines such as pragmatics (Levinson, 2000; Sperber & Wilson, 1982), social psychology (Rommetveit, 1974), linguistic anthropology (Hanks, 1996), and sociology (cf. Goffman, 1974), especially sociological research in the ethnomethodological tradition (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984). p. 10

Following Garfinkel, Koschmann et al. (2006) argue for the study of “member’s methods” of meaning making: “how participants in such [instructional] settings actually go about doing learning” p. 11

The study of the interactional accomplishment of intersubjective learning or group cognition gives rise to interesting questions that are among the most challenging facing any social- behavioral science, and even touch upon our nature as conscious beings. Do cognitive phenomena take place trans-personally in group discourse? How is it possible for learning, usually conceived of as a cognitive function, to be distributed across people and artifacts? How can we understand knowledge as accomplished practice rather than as a possession or even predisposition? p. 12

CSCL can presently be characterized as consisting of three methodological traditions: experimental, descriptive and iterative design. p. 13

the foregoing considerations suggest that we explore hybrid research methodologies (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004). Experimental designs can continue to compare interventions, but the comparisons would be made in terms of the features identified in micro-analyses of how information technology influences and is appropriated for members’ methods of joint meaning making. p. 13

Sfard (1998) defines two broad and irreconcilable metaphors of learning that are necessarily relevant to CSCL: the acquisition metaphor, in which learning consists of individuals acquiring knowledge stored in their minds, and the participation metaphor, in which learning consists of increasing participation in communities of practice. Lipponen, Hakkarainen & Paavola, (2004) adds a third metaphor based on Bereiter (2002) and Engeström (1987): the knowledge creation metaphor, in which new knowledge objects or social practices are created in the world through collaboration. p. 14