These studies strive to be essays in the postmodern sense described by Adorno (1958/1984, p. 160f): In (loc: 508-10)

Vygotsky described what is distinctive to human cognition, psychological processes that are not simply biological abilities, as mediated cognition. He analyzed how both signs (words, gestures) and tools (instruments) act as artifacts that mediate human thought and behavior—and he left the way open for other forms of mediation: “A host of other mediated activities might be named; cognitive activity is not limited to the use of tools or signs” (Vygotsky, 1930/1978, p. 55). (loc: 609-12)

Small groups are the engines of knowledge building. The knowing that groups build up in manifold forms is what becomes internalized by their members as individual learning and externalized in their communities as certifiable knowledge. (loc: 635-37)

My own experience during the studies reported here and in my apprenticeships in philosophy and computer science that preceded them impressed upon me the importance of working groups, reading circles and informal professional discussion occasions for the genesis of new ideas and insights. The same can be seen on a world-historical scale. Quantum jumps in human knowledge building emerge from centers of group interaction: the Bauhaus designers at Weimar, the post-impressionist artists in Paris salons, the Vienna Circle, the Frankfurt School—in the past, these communities were necessarily geographic locations where people could come together in small groups at the same time and place. (loc: 681-88)

In order to design effective media, we need to develop a theory of mediated collaboration through a design-based research agenda of analysis of small-group cognition. Most theories of knowledge building in working and learning have focused primarily on the two extreme scales: the individual unit of analysis as the acquirer of knowledge and the community unit of analysis as the context within which participation takes place. We now need to focus on the intermediate scale: the small-group unit of analysis as the discourse in which knowledge actually emerges. (loc: 691-96)

members than in dyads. The emphasis on the group as unit of analysis is definitive of this book. It is not just a matter of claiming that it is time to focus software development on groupware. It is also a methodological rejection of individualism as a focus of empirical analysis and cognitive theory. The book argues that software should support cooperative work and collaborative learning; it should be assessed at the group level and it should be designed to foster group cognition. (loc: 702-6)

This book tries to explore how to create a science of collaboration support grounded in a fine-grained understanding of how people act, work, learn and think together. It approaches this by focusing the discussion of software design, interaction analysis and conceptual frameworks on central, paradigmatic phenomena of small-group collaboration, such as multiple interpretive perspectives, intersubjective meaning making and knowledge building at the group unit of analysis. (loc: 717-20)

many people react against the ideals of collaboration and the concept of group cognition based on unfortunate personal experiences, the inadequacies of current technologies and deeply ingrained senses of competition. Although so much working, learning and knowledge building takes place through teamwork these days, goals, conceptualizations and reward structures are still oriented toward individual achievement. (loc: 729-32)

two theoretical orientations: situated cognition and domain-oriented design environments. (loc: 757)

helped situate his initial research (loc: 757)

discussing the then recent works of situated cognition (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Donald, 1991; Dreyfus, 1991; Ehn, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Schön, 1983; Suchman, 1987; Winograd & Flores, 1986), which challenged the assumptions of traditional AI. These writings proposed the centrality of tacit knowledge, implicitly arguing that AI’s reliance on capturing explicit knowledge was inadequate for modeling or replacing human understanding. (loc: 759-62)

people act based on their being situated in specific settings with particular activities, artifacts, histories and colleagues. Shared knowledge is not a stockpile of fixed facts that can be represented in a database and queried on all occasions, but an on-going accomplishment of concrete groups of people engaged in continuing communication and negotiation. Furthermore, knowing is fundamentally perspectival and interpretive. (loc: 762-65)

Gerhard Fischer, which developed the DODE (domain-oriented design environment) (loc: 767)

The idea was that one could build a software system to support designers in a given domain—say, kitchen design—by integrating such components as a drawing sketchpad, a palette of icons representing items from the domain (stovetops, tables, walls), a set of critiquing rules (sink under a window, dishwasher to the right), a hypertext of design rationale, a catalog of previous designs or templates, a searching mechanism, and a facility for adding new palette items, among others. (loc: 768-72)

TCA was a DODE for teachers designing curriculum and CIE was a DODE for computer network designers. (loc: 775-77)

CIE. A critical transition occurs in this study, away from software that is designed to amplify human intelligence with AI techniques. It turns instead toward the goal of software designed to support group interaction by providing structured media of communication, sharing and collaboration. (loc: 833-35)

demonstrate a progression that was not uncommon in CSCL and CSCW around the turn of the century. A twentieth century fascination with technological solutions reached its denouement in AI systems that required more effort than expected and provided less help than promised. In the twenty-first century, researchers acknowledged that systems needed to be user-centric and should concentrate on taking the best advantage of human and group intelligence. In this new context, the important thing for groupware was to optimize the formation of effective groups, help them to articulate and synthesize different knowledge-building perspectives, and support the negotiation of shared group knowledge. (loc: 872-76)

Teachers need software for locating material-rich sites across the network, searching the individual curriculum sources, adapting retrieved materials to their classrooms, organizing these resources in coherent lesson plans and sharing their experiences across the Internet. In response to these needs, I designed and prototyped a Teacher’s Curriculum Assistant (TCA) that provides software support for teachers to make effective use of educational resources posted to the Internet. TCA (loc: 903-9)

Tools are included for tailoring retrieved resources, creating supplementary materials and designing innovative curriculum. TCA encourages teachers to annotate and upload successfully used curriculum to Internet servers in order to share their ideas with other educators. (loc: 910-13)

Cognitive tools include, importantly, alternative knowledge representations (Norman, 1993). As researchers in artificial intelligence, we know that knowledge representations are key to characterizing or modeling cognition. We have also found that professionals working in typical contemporary occupations focus much of their effort on developing and using alternative knowledge representations that are adapted to their tasks (Sumner, 1995). (loc: 982-85)

Teachers need help to create learning environments that stimulate the construction and evolution of understanding through student exploration using multiple conceptual representations. A stimulating learning environment is one with a rich ecology, in which many elements interact in subtle ways. In this (loc: 988-90)

Teacher’s Curriculum Assistant (TCA). TCA includes a catalog of previously designed curricula that can be reused and modified. It has a gallery of educational resources that can be inserted into partial curriculum designs. There is a workspace, into which curricula from the catalog can be loaded and resources from the gallery inserted. It is also possible for a teacher to specify criteria for the desired curriculum. Specifications are used for searching the case-base of curricula, adapting the resources and critiquing new designs. (loc: 1073-79)

Interactive learning environments promise to significantly enrich the experience of students in classrooms by allowing them to explore information under their own intrinsic motivation and to use what they discover to construct knowledge in their own words. To date, a major limitation of educational technology in pursuing this vision has been the inability of computer software to interpret unconstrained free text by students in order to interact with students without limiting their behavior and expression. (loc: 1333-37)

In a project at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Cognitive Science, a research group I worked in developed a system named State the Essence that provides feedback to students on summaries that they compose in their own words from their understanding of assigned instructional texts. (loc: 1337-42)