ijCSCL invited symposium:

1
ijCSCL invited symposium Making use of
productive tensions in CSCL

• Friedrich W. Hesse
• Gerry Stahl
• Jürgen Buder
• Ulrike Cress
• Timothy Koschmann
• Peter Reimann
• Daniel Suthers

2
Productive tensions

• The practice of analysis vs. the practice of
  design Should our practices be geared towards
  analyzing and understanding CSCL phenomena, or
  should there be a stronger focus on finding
  workable solutions in everyday educational
  practice?
• Nomethetic vs. idiographic approach If we are to
  focus on the practice of analysis, should CSCL
  research be directed at identifying generalizable
  patterns of behavior, or should it aim at a deep
  understanding of singular events?
• Reducibility vs. emergent entities When
  theorizing about CSCL, can we reduce the group
  phenomena involved in CSCL by way of individual
  constructs, or should we conceptualize emergent,
  group-level structures?

3
International Journal of CSCL

• This panel is a presentation of ijCSCL.
• The journal is dedicated to publishing innovative
  research in CSCL from all perspectives and
  scientific methodologies.
• The question of methodology is a fundamental and
  complex one within the CSCL research effort. The
  journal is particularly interested in fostering
  new ideas on this topic.
• We hope that the opinions voiced during this
  panel will contribute to that effort.
• Specific positions taken should in no way be seen
  as positions of the journal, its Board of Editors
  or its reviewing perspective.

4
The historical context of CSCL

• CSCL builds on the work of its predecessors
• Research on cooperative learning (e.g., Johnson
  Johnson) focused on learning as a psychological
  process of individuals who happened to be in
  group contexts.
• Computer support of group learning (e.g.,
  computer-mediated communication) took
  face-to-face communication as the gold standard
  and tried to duplicate its characteristics.
• But the potential of CSCL goes essentially beyond
  these
• To overcome the limitations of the individual
  mind, and to inter-animate multiple personal
  perspectives in achievements of group cognition.
• To allow people around the world to build
  knowledge in collectivities not confined by
  geographic and traditional boundaries and to take
  advantage of digital cognitive tools or
  representational media.

5
The historical context of the learning sciences

• Modern society has some entrenched ideologies
• The ideology of the individual treats the learner
  as a consumer and learning as acquisition of
  factual knowledge.
• The ideology of science treats facts as
  discoverable by established methods and science
  as objective knowledge.
• But recent theorists provide new ways of
  conceptualizing learning and science
• Vygotsky and McLuhan argue that our learning is
  fundamentally mediated by social interactions and
  interests.
• Kuhn and Latour argue that sciences follow
  unpredictable paths of inquiry, rather than
  adhering to the ideal picture of science promoted
  by politicians and bureaucrats.

6
CSCL needs research approaches that

• Do not necessarily focus on the individual as the
  learner.
• Do not necessarily rely on methods of established
  and certified sciences.
• Explore the potential of groups to accomplish
  things as groups.
• Explore the potential of software to open new
  opportunities for collaborative learning.
• Innovative research methods appropriate to CSCL,
  not just hybrids of traditional methods.

7
Methodological problems

• We have discovered already that the potential of
  CSCL is still distant. It requires technologies,
  pedagogies, facilitators and student motivations
  that we do not yet have, so we cannot simply
  observe it on a large scale.
• Learning in CSCL requires a combination of very
  different attitudes, tasks and settings, so it
  cannot be studied in controlled
  independent-variable comparisons to individual
  face-to-face learning.
• Interesting occurrences in CSCL settings are
  highly situated, un-reproducible and sparse, so
  they cannot be subjected to automated or
  statistical analysis.
• Characteristics (variables) of a controlled
  setting are enacted (understood, interpreted,
  constructed) by the individuals and groups
  involved, responding to the unique sequentiality
  of interactions and open-ended resources and
  possibilities.

8
Design-based research

• We need to create innovative CSCL settings where
  we can observe group interactions that inform us
  about the nature of collaborative learning and
  about the design of computer support for it.
• Our methods for the analysis of the results will
  need to be invented in response to our particular
  research questions, but should generally be
  oriented to understanding the interactions that
  take place and informing the re-design of the
  technologies that mediate those interactions.
• This will integrate the practice of analysis and
  the practice of design in the analytic design of
  practice.
• From the analysis of informative case studies and
  of collections of related cases, we will build
  and gradually generalize an understanding of how
  collaborative learning proceeds. This
  understanding can provide hypotheses for testing
  specific points.
• The goal of CSCL is to go beyond individual
  learning to group knowledge building. Just as
  there can be no group cognition without
  individual cognition, we should recognize
  conversely that individual learning is at heart a
  social product and that collaborative learning
  generally incorporates individual learningnot by
  being reducible to it, but as a result of
  building shared meaning.

9
Research on Virtual Math Teams

• We created an online learning environment
  designed to foster and study group cognition.
• We analyze how shared meaning is constructed by
  means of textual interactions and drawings in
  this environment.
• We analyze how students enact the affordances and
  resources available to them.
• We use our analyses to inform our continuing
  design of technology, pedagogy and online
  service.
• We reflect upon our gradually increasing
  understanding of life in virtual math teams to
  evolve our theory of group cognition.