BUILDING COLLABORATIVE KNOWING: ELEMENTS OF A SOCIAL THEORY OF
CSCL
1. INTRODUCTION
This chapter discusses a core phenomenon for a theory
of CSCL: building collaborative knowing. Rather than reviewing, one after
another, various theories that are currently influential in the field of CSCL,
a view of collaboration is outlined here that synthesizes important concepts
and approaches from these other sources. It takes some of the abstract concepts
proposed by these theories and attempts to unwrap what is bundled up in these
concepts by illustrating them with a concrete empirical example of building
collaborative knowing. It contributes to a social theory of CSCL by unpacking
central concepts and by using them to understand the process by which a small
group collaboratively builds new knowing. The better we can understand how the
processes involved in collaborative learning actually work, the better we can
design computer support for them and the better we can evaluate the
effectiveness of the learning and of the support.
1.1. The need for theory in CSCL
It is often assumed that every professional discipline
is founded on a well-worked-out theory that defines the objects, goals and
methods of its domain. However, when one really needs to use the theory – such
as to guide the design of concrete software to support collaborative learning –
one discovers that at best what exists are bitter controversies and disturbing
questions concerning the fundamentals. This is certainly the case with CSCL: We
are still arguing over its very name.
Yet, one cannot proceed without theory. How would
developers, teachers or researchers know what kind of software or curriculum to
develop, how to introduce it into the classroom, or how to assess its
effectiveness without a theory of CSCL?
Definitions – a starting point for theory – are always
contentious. What authors mean by “computer support,” “collaborative” or
“learning” are different every time someone else tries to define them. If one
pragmatically says, just look at the papers at a CSCL conference to see what
the domain is, one finds papers that never mention computers, let alone
pedagogically innovative software, or that have nothing to do with
collaboration and may be far removed from most concepts of learning. Yet,
despite this, there is a field of CSCL with an active research community and
much to recommend its adoption in higher education classrooms.
So this chapter will provide a consciously contentious perspective
on key elements of theory for CSCL. In particular, it will be contentious by
emphasizing activity and accomplishments at the group level. This is what we mean by a social theory of learning, in contrast to traditional ideas about
learning as something that takes place primarily in the minds of individual
people. Because the word “learning” often directs attention at psychological or
mental processes at the level of the individual participant, this chapter will
often use the term “building knowing” in place of “learning.” Rather than
saying that a group learns we will say it builds the extent of its knowing.
This slightly awkward locution has the added advantage of distancing itself
from the idea of accumulating things called “knowledge,” as in the idea of
“learning facts”; what groups learn is often practices rather than facts, ways
of doing things. Pea (1993) similarly uses the term “distributed
intelligence” to avoid the connotations of “learning” as involving decontextualized
mental representations of individuals.
The term “building collaborative knowing,” coined for this
chapter, is derived from the work of Scardamalia and Bereiter (1996), who did much to found the
field of CSCL. As used here, the phrase is intended to point to a core process
in collaborative learning: a particular way in which a group may construct a
new degree of understanding about the topic that they are investigating. This
new knowing is something that the group creates that cannot be attributed to
the mental processes of any one individual. As Bereiter (2002) says,
The mark of a really successful design or problem-solving
meeting is that something brilliant comes out of it that cannot be attributed
to an individual or to a combination of individual contributions. It is an
emergent, which means that if you look at a transcript of the meeting you can
see the conceptual object taking shape but you cannot find it in the bits and
pieces making up the discourse.
We will take this phenomenon as of particular interest to a
theory of collaborative learning. There are many ways in which “learning” can
take place: over short and long time periods, in solitude and socially,
formally and informally, tacitly and explicitly, in practice and in theory.
There are many ways in which people collaborate and learn: by teaching each
other, viewing from different perspectives, dividing tasks, pooling results,
brainstorming, critiquing, negotiating, compromising, agreeing. While all these
aspects of learning and collaboration may be relevant to CSCL, we will focus on
the phenomenon of building collaborative knowing, where group members invent
knowledge and skill together that none of them would likely have constructed
alone (Fischer & Granoo,
1995; Hatano & Inagaki, 1991; Mead, 1934/1962; Wittgenstein, 1953). We will look at a transcript
of a meeting where we can see increased knowing taking shape in the group
discourse, and we will note how it is not attributable to individual
understandings.
Collaboration takes place within other activities of
learning and cooperation, of individual meaning-making and social
enculturation. This chapter focuses on those brief, possibly rare episodes in
which group discourse builds meanings, that can then be variously interpreted
by the group members or sedimented in artifacts. It may well be in the mining
of such gems of interaction that the potential of CSCL lies. Too often, this
key stage in collaborative learning is skipped over by theories; either it is
treated as a mystery or as an individual act of creativity, which is not
further explained, or it is wrapped up in an abstract concept like “synergy”
that names the phenomenon without analyzing it. But this emphatically collaborative
achievement is a key to CSCL, for this is what most dramatically sets it apart
from individual learning. At least that is the hypothesis of this chapter. The
analysis of such a group accomplishment requires a new way of thinking, a
social theory.
1.2. A social theory for CSCL
It is not bad for theory to be subject to contending
views and arguments, and to have to compete for acceptance. The purpose of
proposing theory is to subject it to the discourse of the research community so
that it can be refined, critiqued and negotiated to contribute to that
community’s collaborative knowing. This is where science gets its real power (Donald, 1991). This book’s title should not
be taken to imply that we know a large set of eternal truths about CSCL, but
that we are engaged in a collaborative process of building shared knowing about
the field and its potential. This chapter is an attempt to pull together
threads from an on-going conversation and to contribute a new, tentative
textual artifact into that process in the hope that it will be taken up,
critiqued and modified. At the point that you read this in published form, it
will already have passed through a debate involving the diverse perspectives of
some of the book’s authors.
The CSCL theories incorporated here are particularly
contentious because theoreticians like Lave (1996) or Engeström (1999) build on a social theory tradition that goes back
to Hegel (1807/1967), Marx (1867/1976) and Vygotsky (1930/1978). This theory is historically,
culturally, linguistically and politically foreign to many people, whose
intellectual instincts are shaped by an older, more ingrained tradition that
focuses on individual minds as
rational agents.
Prevalent enlightened thinking about learning owes much to
Descartes’ (1633/1999) theory of ideas as existing
in individual minds isolated from the material and social world. Thorndikian
educational theories, which still dominate schooling, go back to this
philosophic position. The history of philosophy and theory since Descartes has
moved toward a more dynamic, social view. Kant (1787/1999) argued that our knowledge of
reality was not simply given by the material world, but was constituted by the
human mind, which imposes a basic structure. Hegel (1807/1967) introduced a developmental
view in which this process of constitution evolves through historical changes.
Marx (1867/1976) grounded these changes in
socio-economic phenomena. Heidegger (1927/1996) then proposed a view of human
being that is more firmly situated in the world than Descartes’ approach.
Figure 1 provides a graphical representation of how the influences mentioned
here led to social versus individual theories of learning.
Figure
1. Influences on individual theories of learning (top of figure) and social
theories of learning (below the line).
1.3. This chapter’s approach to theory
It is difficult for most people to think in terms of
group cognition because of the traditional focus on the individual. It is also
hard to comprehend the subtle and complex interactions that pass between group
and individual knowing or between meaning embedded in an artifact and its
interpretation in a person’s mind. But such comprehension is necessary for
understanding the social approach to a theory of CSCL.
One needs, first of all, the right vocabulary for thinking
about phenomena that occur on levels of analysis that we are not familiar with
discussing. We need an appropriate conceptual framework and analytic
perspective. This is what is meant here by a “theory.” Philosophy used to
provide such intellectual resources, but recently this has become a task for
interdisciplinary sciences, such as anthropology, communication theory, social
theory and even computer science. This chapter will draw on theoretical
reflections and conceptualizations from these fields to try to understand the
phenomenon of building collaborative knowing. “Theory” in this chapter is not
meant in the sense of clear and distinct definitions of concepts, empirical
laws, rigorous methodologies and mathematical precision. It is meant to provide
a way of looking at social interactions in terms of inter-related phenomena and
concepts such as: “artifact”, “situation”, “meaning”, “interpretation”, “tacit
knowing”, “perspectives”, “negotiation”, “internalization”. These concepts are
not so much defined in unambiguous sentences, as they are borrowed from other
theories or philosophies and adapted into an emerging conceptualization. The
terms glean their definitions from each other, as a result of how they are
configured together (Adorno, 1958). So these terms should become
gradually more meaningful as you read through the chapter and try to apply its
view to phenomena presented in the chapter or in your world.
The nature of the interactions involved in building
collaborative knowing have scarcely been investigated in any tradition,
although they are absolutely fundamental to a possible theory for CSCL. While
available philosophies can provide some direction for exploring these
interactions, empirical investigations are urgently required. We need to better
understand how knowledge and meaning can be encapsulated in a wide variety of artifacts
and then how groups of people can come to understand these embedded meanings
and effectively interpret them. We need to look carefully at examples of this
taking place under real-world conditions. Therefore, this chapter will begin
with a fragmentary empirical analysis of a sample moment of collaboration
(section 2).
The empirical example then introduces the intertwining of
individual (psychological) and group (social) processes (section 3), through
which collaborative knowing can be built. The sharing of knowledge among group
participants as well as the building of the group’s own knowing is accomplished
interactively, primarily through situated discourse processes (section 4).
Discourse, which makes things explicit, relies on a background
of tacit or practical knowing. The co-construction of shared knowing in
discourse involves the negotiation of tacit meanings, for instance of the
affordances of artifacts (section 5). The network of these meanings constitutes
the social world in which we live and which we come to understand by building
collaborative knowing (section 6).
This chapter attempts to suggest the core elements of a
social philosophy that could provide a foundation for CSCL. Such a theory
necessarily involves issues of epistemology, semiotics, hermeneutics and
ontology. Epistemology asks how knowledge is possible; social epistemology
shows how knowing is interactively constructed within communities (section 3).
Semiotics asks how signs can have meaning; social semiotics shows how meanings
of signs and other artifacts are socially constituted (section 4). Hermeneutics
asks how we can interpret meaning; social hermeneutics shows how individuals
interpret socially shared meaning (section 5). Ontology asks what kinds of
beings exist; social ontology shows how beings are produced and reproduced
within a society (section 6).
The kind of social epistemology, semiotics, hermeneutics and
ontology proposed here would not provide a complete social theory. For that, we
would have to build up from the social as small group to the social as
institutions and multi-nationals, including cultural and historical levels of
description – and then return from these abstract social formations to the
concrete activities in which people find themselves in any given moment, but
this time fully mediated by categories and understandings from the larger
socio-historical context (Bourdieu, 1972/1995;
Giddens, 1984; Habermas, 1981/1984; Marx, 1867/1976; Sartre, 1968). The foundations and concepts
for such a fuller social theory could come in part from the elements presented
in this chapter.
The theory of building collaborative knowing sketched in
sections 3 to 6 has implications for the field of CSCL. Section 7 touches on some
of the major implications (a) for a methodology of empirical analyses of
collaborative knowing, (b) for the design of CSCL software artifacts and (c)
for CSCL classroom practices in higher education. These are, of course,
subsequently discussed at greater length in other chapters.
2. A MOMENT OF COLLABORATION
The theory presented in this chapter emerged through an
analysis of a specific example of collaborative learning. This section presents
that example. The following sections use the example to illustrate the concepts
of the theory.
2.1. Why we need empirical examples of collaboration
Writing about contentious matters like the nature and
mechanisms of collaboration is risky. Each reader will interpret the meaning of
what is said by relating it to her own experiences or to his existing
understandings and to prevalent “folk theories” (established wisdom and common
worldviews). Paradigmatic examples of small groups building collaborative
knowing are still rare these days and the mechanisms underlying them have yet
to be well analyzed. So skepticism and misunderstanding are the expected
outcome unless the starting point for the reader’s interpretation can be
appropriately grounded in shared experience. To this end, we first introduce a
brief empirical example and some hints for interpreting it. We invite the
reader to study our fuller analysis (Stahl, 2002) and to search for and reflect upon other
examples (e.g., (Koschmann, 1999; Roschelle,
1996; Sfard & McClain, 2003) and studies from ethnography, psychology
and ethnomethodology).
Clearly, our case study is not representative of all CSCL
activities – it is not even typical for the focus of this book. However, it
provides a particularly useful illustration of the phenomenon of building
collaborative knowing that we want to analyze in this chapter. That our example
represents some generality is suggested by its similarity to what Hatano and
Inagaki (1991) describe as “collective
comprehension activities” in Japanese classrooms: they take place among small
groups of students, involve references to an artifact (or source of
confirmation) and include room for comprehension.
The example we present takes place in a middle school, not
in higher education. This provides a clearer view of the collaborative building
of an instance of elementary science knowing: the principle of varying only one
parameter of an experimental situation at a time. In higher education, most
students have some sense of this principle, but in middle school we can observe
such an understanding being constructed for the first time. In addition, the
computer discourse is not computer mediated; the face-to-face interaction
provides richer, clearer, more intuitive evidence for what is taking place;
this is helpful for analyzing the detailed interactions that constitute the
building of collaborative knowing – although examples will also need to be
studied that are computer-mediated. The sample interaction is, however,
computer-supported by a software rocket simulation, so that we can observe how
the students increase their knowing about how to use a digital artifact.
Empirical examples are more than mere aids to presentation
of a theory. It is necessary to show how theory is grounded in and integrated
with empirical studies. Theory can be very abstract and leave the detailed
mechanisms undeveloped. Often, these details are crucial for practical
application of the theory – such as for guiding the design of technology to
support collaboration – and are required for fleshing out the theory itself.
Thus, while several recent theories stress the role of artifacts as embodiments
of shared understanding (Dourish, 2001), little has been written
about how new users of the artifacts learn to share these stored understandings
– a question investigated in a modest way in our example.
The
example used in this chapter is not an arbitrary illustration of independent
ideas. The theory discussed actually grew out of the detailed analysis of this
particular collaborative interaction. By presenting the theory within the
context of its empirical origin, we try to situate the reader within a concrete
understanding of the phenomena being analyzed.
2.2. The experimental situation
Five 11-year-old boys are building model rockets for a
science project at school. A computer scientist from the community volunteered
to work with the students; he developed a software simulation of rockets with different
design attributes (different engines, nose cones, fins and surface textures).
The students can fire 8 different rockets and record their heights 
in a datasheet. A list of the attributes of
the 8 rockets is displayed on the computer screen next to the simulation. The
two sessions with the simulation totaled 3 hours and were video-recorded (see
Figure 2).
The first session begins with the students reading the list
of rocket descriptions and discussing with the mentor how to figure out which
attributes did best in the simulation and might therefore be good to design
into their model rockets. Then, working in two subgroups, they fire the
different rockets multiple times and average their heights, to adjust for
random fluctuations due to simulated weather conditions. After filling their
data sheets, the students are guided by the mentor to figure out which
attributes are optimal. Most of the discussion up to this point is
teacher-centric, with the mentor posing questions, evaluating responses and
controlling turn-taking, as is typical in school settings (Lemke, 1990).
A key aspect of the experiment is that the list of rocket
descriptions was carefully designed to make it easy to compare pairs of rocket
descriptions that differ in only one attribute. The relevant pairs are listed
consecutively and the differing attribute is written in bold face (see Figure
3). However, even after having read the list aloud and having worked with the
simulation for over an hour – with the list on-screen the whole time – the
students are literally unable to see this property of the list.
2.3. Preliminary analysis
At a certain point, after the mentor gestures at the list,
the students launch into an intense collaborative interaction, consisting of a
brief utterance about once a second. Following is a transcript of that
collaborative moment, beginning with the mentor’s directing of the group
attention to the list. We can start our analysis by dividing the interaction in
the transcript excerpt into four phases:
Phase a. The
transcript begins at
|
|
|
And (0.1) you don’t
have anything like that there? |
|
|
|
(2.0 second pause) |
|
|
Steven |
I don’t think so |
|
|
Jamie |
Not with the same
engine |
|
|
Steven |
No |
|
|
Jamie |
Not with the same |
|
|
|
With the same engine …
but with a different (0.1) … nose cone? |
|
|
Chuck |
the same |
|
|
Jamie |
Yeah, |
|
|
Chuck |
These are both (0.8)
the same thing |
|
|
|
(1.0) |
Phase b.
After a significant pause at
|
|
|
Awright |
|
|
Brent |
This one’s
different ((gestures with pen at
computer 1 screen)) |
|
|
Jamie |
Yeah, but it has same
no… (1.0) |
|
|
Chuck |
Pointy nose cone |
Phase c.
While Chuck continues to argue against the implication of the mentor’s
rhetorical question, Steven, Jamie and Brent successively dispute Chuck’s
utterances. They point to rockets 1 and 2 as being a pair with different nose
cones.
|
|
Steven |
Oh, yeah |
|
|
Chuck |
But it’s not the same
engine |
|
|
Jamie |
Yeah, it is, |
|
|
Brent |
Yes it is, |
|
|
Jamie |
Compare two n one |
|
|
Brent |
Number two |
|
|
Chuck |
(0.2) I know. |
Phase d.
Making explicit which rockets to look at on the list finally gets Chuck to
align with the rest of the group. Chuck had apparently been trying to find a
rocket to compare with rocket 3 or 4 and had rejected 2 because although it had
a different nose cone it did not have the same engine as 3 or 4. Once everyone
saw the pair of 1 and 2, the group could proceed with their task and quickly
draw a scientific conclusion.
|
|
Jamie |
(0.2) Are the same |
|
|
Chuck |
Oh |
|
|
Brent |
It’s the same engine. |
|
|
Jamie |
So if you compare two n
one, |
|
|
Chuck |
Oh yeah, I see, I see,
I see |
|
|
Jamie |
(0.8) Yeah. Compare two
n one. So that the rounded n- (0.1) no the rounded one is better. Number one. |
Keep this concrete interaction in mind when the
discussions become more abstract in the following sections. In each phase we
can observe phenomena that will be taken up in later sections.
In phase a there is a breakdown in understanding between the
mentor and the students. In overcoming this breakdown, the group will build
collaborative knowing: by the end, the whole group will know how to find
significant pairs of rockets on the list. Section 3 will look at how such
knowing is interactively constructed in groups so that it is then available to
the group’s members.
In phase b and throughout the collaborative moment, we
observe very brief utterances, like “This one’s different,” “The same” or even
“Yeah.” Such utterances are not meaningful by themselves, but only within the
context of the group interaction. They serve mainly to point to other
utterances, to reference items in the list or to engage in the group
interaction (e.g., aligning, disagreeing, arguing or clarifying). Section 4
will explore how meaning – that is not completely given in these utterances of
individuals – can be understood only at the group unit of analysis.
In phase c there is a concerted effort to realign the shared
understanding of the group that broke down in phase a. At first, the students
argue against the mentor. But in subsequent phases they gradually come to align
with him. In the discourse itself (and nowhere else), we can see these shifts
as the individual interpretive perspectives of the different students change
and align. Section 5 will distinguish “meaning” – that exists in the shared
social world – and “interpretation” of that meaning by groups and individuals.
In phase d everyone is able to see the descriptions of
rockets 1 and 2 the way the mentor implied. Although the descriptions were in
the list all along – and Chuck had even read them aloud an hour and a half
earlier – it took a while for the students to see the meaning that had been
designed into the artifact. Section 6 will explore how affordances and meanings
that are preserved in artifacts and words must be interpreted within concrete
and practical situations involving discourse, tasks and other forms of social
interaction.
3. INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP KNOWING
Theories of learning tend to emphasize either
individual or group knowing. It is difficult but important to understand how
both take place and influence (or constitute) each other.
3.1. Individual and group learning in the example
Our data about collaborative learning in section 2 is
given at the level of a videotaped interaction and transcribed discourse, with
some contextual information. To understand the learning that took place, a
researcher must analyze it within the context of the group. That is, the
activity system of tasks, artifacts, interactions, symbols, social practices,
roles and community of practice forms the unit of analysis. It is in this unit
that meaning is constructed and new ways of knowing are built. The meanings
generated within this unit are absorbed into the group’s knowing.
As researchers of learning, we can analyze our data either
by looking at the group discourse as a whole or by following the trajectories
of individuals within the group discourse. That is, we can focus either on the
group (i.e., the activity system as distributed among several people engaged
with each other and with artifacts in complex ways) or on the individual as the
unit of our analysis. Of course, we can also reflect upon how events at one
level effect those at the other; this is, in fact, essential in order to get a
full picture (Fischer & Granoo,
1995; Hatano & Inagaki, 1991). In our example data we see that there is a
breakdown in the group discourse and that individual contributions shift their
positions within the group in order to re-establish a healthy group discourse.
3.2. Shared and personal knowing
We
also notice in our sample transcript that individual utterances only make sense
within the group context and the shared situation. Closer analysis – presented
in section 4 – reveals that individual contributions build on what has taken
place within the group discourse, on current features in the shared
situation and on future possibilities for joint activity. Thus, the individual utterances rely
heavily upon the group discourse; we can argue that the group unit of analysis
has an epistemological priority in that it provides prior conditions necessary
for the knowing that can then take place at the individual unit.
The group
unit is significant particularly in collaborative
learning. Whereas in cooperative or coordinated work, tasks are often divided
up so that individuals actually work and build knowledge on an individual basis
and then attempt to share the results, in collaboration, by definition (Dillenbourg, 1999), the work is done by the group as a
whole, for instance in meetings or other forms of discourse. For this reason,
social approaches to theory are especially appropriate for CSCL. Section 4 will
situate individual utterances and personal knowing within their social context.
3.3. Cognitive and social theories
Analyses of learning usually focus either on
individual contributions as expressions of psychological states of individual
people (the “cognitivist” or “acquisition” perspective) or on the collective
accomplishments of a community or a society (the “socio-cultural” or
“participation” perspective – see (Sfard, 1998)). The cognitivist perspective takes utterances to be expressions of
pre-existing mental representations or ideas of individuals, while the
socio-cultural perspective takes elements of the language used to be social
creations or conventions of the culture. By analysing our transcript data,
however, we can see how both the utterances and the terminology they include
are interactively constructed in the discourse as a whole – so that there is no
need to posit either pre-existing mental constructs or fixed structures of
social conventions independent of the discourse and determining it. Rather, on
the contrary, we can see the mental and the social as results or products of
previous discourse, now sedimented into meaningful cognitive and linguistic
artefacts that function in current activities. Section 5 will discuss in more
detail how meaning is thereby constructed and interpreted in group interaction.
3.4. Collaborative learning as
building knowing
4. SITUATED DISCOURSE
Utterances in our experimental data derive their
meaning from the discourse situation, which they in turn contribute to
interactively constructing.
4.1. References to the situation
The utterances in our example transcript can be
characterized as: indexical, elliptical and projective. That is, they are not
meaningful in isolation – the way propositions are traditionally taken to be.
They are meaningful only through their references to the current physical
context, prior utterances or projected future possibilities within the
activity.
Looking at the utterances in our transcript, we can identify
some that are indexical: their
meaning depends upon their reference to some artifact in the environment, like
a rocket or a rocket description (e.g., “this one …”). Other utterances are elliptical in that they leave out
crucial parts of what would be a complete proposition, assuming that the hearer
can fill these in based on previous statements in the discourse history (e.g.,
“Number two”). Finally, some utterances are projective: they must be interpreted in terms of a desired future
state of the discourse (e.g., “So if you compare …”).
The meaning of these utterances is not self-contained, but
is constituted by reference to a totality of inter-connected artifacts that
make up the world of the group. We call this world the situation and refer to the discourse as “situated.” Utterances
often function as signs, pointing to networks of meaningful terms, artifacts
and activities.
4.2.
Preserving knowing in words and artifacts
In our example situation, the word “different” plays an
important role. In the pivotal utterance, “This one’s different,” there is an
indexical reference to an item on the list artifact as well as to the mentor’s
previous use of the term “different.” Brent appropriates the mentor’s term; in the
subsequent group discourse, this reference is extensively developed in terms of
what is or is not the “same” and the activity of comparing rockets. Through the
transcribed interaction, the participants gradually come to see what Brent
referred to as “this one” as “different.” The vocabulary of “different,” “same”
and “compare” serves to point out relationships in the list so that everyone in
the group can see them. In the process, the terms preserve this new
knowing-how-to-look-at-the-list in their extended meaningfulness to the group.
At the end of the collaborative moment, the group knows much better how to use
both the terms and the list artifact to which they refer. It is likely that the
mentor already interpreted the terms and the artifact this way, but that the
students had to learn to interpret these meanings as preserved in the terms and
artifact.
Brent’s
interpretation of “this one” as “different” is a first step in articulating a
full meaning for the salient differences and similarities among pairs of
rockets in the group activity. One can see here the initial phase of the verbal
formation of meaning. It is like observing Michelangelo starting to chisel a
rectangular block of marble and seeing a human form struggling to emerge from
the inert stone in which it is embodied (Figure 4). Brent may first use the
term “different” by mimicking the mentor’s speech. As he and his fellow
students continue to use it, its meaning becomes more differentiated,
articulated and refined through its connections among more utterances and their
circumstances. Eventually, we can say that the students have learned the
meaning of the comparison vocabulary as scientific technical terms.
In the next sections, we will describe how meaning is
embodied in artifacts and sedimented in language. Through this, meanings that
may have originally been created in ephemeral spoken utterances become persistent. This makes possible the
preservation of the meanings over time, so that we can say that knowledge has
been created as a product that can be effective over time.
4.3. Common ground and distributed cognition
We have seen that meaning is given by a shared world
that is interactively constructed in collaborative discourse. This is somewhat
different from some understandings of common ground that start with the
individual unit of analysis and then try to account for a shared reality.
Common ground is sometimes taken to be an agreement among individuals who all somehow
have the same meanings or knowledge as part of their background understanding,
and that makes possible further interaction (Clark & Brennan, 1991). But in our theory, as we have started to
see and as we will see in more detail in the next section, the meanings are
part of a single world, situation or activity system in which the individuals all
interact. So the common ground exists from the start for them as a world in
which they exist together, and is not something that has to be established
through some kind of agreement among mental contents.
This theory is not exactly the same as distributed
cognition, which also argues that at least some meaning is “in the world”
rather than all being “in people’s heads” (Hutchins, 1996). Certainly, meaningful artifacts
exist in the physical world. But the meaning is not physically present in the
same sense as the body of the artifact itself. The meaning comes from the
networks of reference in which the artifact is located (Stahl, 2003).
An artifact is perceived as meaningful, but this perception
is a matter of interpretation. In our example, for instance, we saw that the
meaning of the list artifact was not immediately perceptible to the students,
but they had to learn how to see it. The common ground, that had broken down,
was interactively achieved in the transcribed interaction; it was an
accomplishment of the group interaction, not a matter of arbitrary agreement
among the individuals to pre-existing ideas in their heads. The group discourse
had to focus on the list as a salient artifact and develop an interpretation of
its meaning. The ability to include the list artifact effectively in their
activity was something that the group had to achieve.
4.4. Creating knowing at the group unit of analysis
Knowing how to
use the list artifact was not something that was passed from the mentor to the
individual students through propositional instruction. Rather, the group of
students evolved that ability by responding to each other’s utterances. The mentor
had established a context in which this could productively take place by
setting up the classroom activity system with designed artifacts, specific
activities that required knowing how to use the artifacts, and a pointed
question that offered some terminology. The utterances at the start of the
transcript disagree with each other (“No. . . . Not with the same. . . .”).
Subsequent utterances respond to these, increasingly clarifying differences and
justifying views. In the end, there is agreement within the group discourse,
established by a process that took place within the group as the actor, subject
or unit of analysis.
Collaborative learning took place as the group’s increasing
ability to talk about the list artifact within the immediate task of responding
to the mentor’s hypothetical question and within the larger classroom activity
of designing effective model rockets. Progress was made through normal
discourse processes, specifically repairing a breakdown in shared references to
rockets in the list. Overcoming the breakdown involved aligning the interpretations
of the individual students within the meanings embodied in the list.
Theories influential within CSCL emphasize assessing
learning on the group level and supporting group processes with technology:
Scardamalia and Bereiter’s (1996) vision of computer-supported
learning communities, in which the community as a whole learns, was defining of
the field. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) situated learning involves
changes in the social practices and configuration of the community itself.
Engeström’s (1999) expansive
learning approach even looks at learning taking place when multiple groups
interact with each other.
5. MEANING AND INTERPRETATION
Collaborative learning is a process of constructing
meaning. Meaning creation most often takes place and can be observed at the
group unit of analysis. Meaning in the context of collaborative learning is
viewed as an integral part of communication, and therefore necessarily as
shared within a community. Meaning can be embodied in physical or virtual (computer-based)
artifacts or sedimented in words or gestures. Created by groups,
institutionalized in communities of practice and preserved in artifacts,
meaning must be reactivated by newcomers to the community as part of their
apprenticeship (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Individuals must learn to interpret
these meanings, as the students in our transcript learn to interpret the
meaning in the list artifact and the meaning in the mentor’s use of the term
“different.”
5.1. Meaning as use and knowing in use
The kind of empirically-based social theory we are
proposing here looks at how groups actually create, share, use and interpret
meaning as an integral part of social interaction. This is quite different from
the mainstream tradition. Philosophers have long struggled to understand the
nature of meaning by focusing on the individual unit of analysis. They sought
the meaning of words in clear and distinct definitions, the meaning of ideas in
their correspondence with reality or the meaning of thoughts in mental
representations.
But these attempts to define meaning as a property of
individual minds – whose mental representations correspond to realities in the
world – did not succeed. In critiquing this tradition, Wittgenstein (1953) argued that the meaning of an
utterance involved how it is used to accomplish practical moves within
“language games” that are part of the speaker’s “form of life.” Austin (1952) and Searle (1969) further developed this view
of speech acts as having pragmatic effects within group interaction systems,
including social institutions and conventional practices. Functional grammar (Halliday, 1985) took this yet another step, analyzing
the grammatical components of a sentence as relationships within a network of
meaning.
Using functional grammar as a tool, Lemke (1990), for instance, analyses the
discourse of a science classroom as the construction of a complex network of
meaning; this linguistic network constitutes the scientific theory that the
students are learning. The collaborative learning of the class consists of the
explicit elaboration of this network, and the individual learning of the
students consist in their ability to re-state parts of this meaningful network.
In constructing the network, the teacher and textbooks use a variety of
alternative terms and metaphors, so that meanings can be abstracted from the
use of multiple phrasings. Students are then expected to be able to talk, write
and reason about parts of the network of meaning in their own words and to
understand novel descriptions.
In our sample data, we saw a temporary breakdown in the
construction of a network of meaning. Although the students had previously
identified rockets with “different” fins, they could not abstract this ability
to identify rockets with different nose cones under their specific
circumstances. To overcome the breakdown, the students employed gestures,
argumentation, peer pressure, the list artifact, clarification and explication.
They also built on their practical experience with their model rockets, the
simulation rockets and their data collection sheets. Perhaps most
significantly, their success in constructing a network of meaning that included
consistent references between utterances and rockets on the list artifact came
about through group interactions driven by the classroom activity system,
including the need to respond appropriately to the mentor’s hypothetical question.
Thus, the network of meaning grew out of group discourse processes; but these
were embedded in contexts of practical social activity. The knowing that the
students built was not just a theoretical knowing evidenced by their ability to
talk about the rockets consistently, but a practical knowing involving the
ability to accomplish tasks within the activity structure context.
5.2. Tacit and practical knowing
It is common to
think of “knowing” as the ability to state facts in propositions. But there is
also what Polanyi (1962, 1966) calls tacit knowledge, which includes the ability to do things – like ride a bicycle – even though you may not be able
to put that knowledge into words. “Tacit” means “un-stated” and “explicit”
means “stated in words.” The students know how to follow non-verbal
communication cues like gaze, pauses and body orientation, as well as to engage
in explicit discussion.
Heidegger (1927/1996) showed that tacit or
practical knowing actually has an epistemological priority over explicit or
theoretical knowing. To understand a proposition requires that one already have
immense amounts of background ontological knowing about the world, about people
and about the kinds of objects referred to by the proposition. Language is a
form of communication and interaction with other people and with the world – to
understand language one must understand it within the context of a broader
tacit pre-understanding of social interaction and of the everyday world of
ordinary life.
5.3. Interpretation as making explicit
In the process of building collaborative knowing, there
is an interplay between tacit and explicit knowing. In Polanyi’s analysis, what
is explicit is the current focus of attention. It stands forward against a
background of tacit knowing. As attention shifts – e.g., as the topic of
discourse moves on – what was explicit becomes tacit and something tacit is
made explicit by being put into words. Heidegger calls the process of making
explicit “interpretation.”
Interpretation is making x explicit as “y.” By doing so, it integrates x
into the situational matrix (as “y”). X is understood as having the meaning
“y,” which is defined by “y”’s position in the interpreter’s network of
references. Discourse is interpretation. It makes things “explicit,” puts them
into words. As man-made embodiments of meaning, words are semiotic artifacts
that are part of the network of significations.
When Brent says, “This one’s different,” he is making
explicit what he sees in the list artifact: he points to rocket 2 as different (tacitly:
different from rocket 1 in terms of its type of nose cone). According to Heidegger,
perception of the world and engagement in the world is always interpretive,
even when it is tacit. The process of explicit interpretation takes the
existing interpretation and develops it further. At first, Brent and the other
students saw rocket 2 as not being comparable with rocket 3 or 4 because it had
a different kind of engine. But then he suddenly saw rocket 2 as comparable but
different from rocket 1. This became explicit as he saw the description of
rocket 2 differently, leaned forward, pointed to it and said, “This one’s
different.”
Brent’s “Aha experience” is an instance of what Wittgenstein
(1953) calls “seeing as.”
Among several ambiguous graphical images, Wittgenstein presents a wire-frame
cube (see Figure 5). The viewer might first see a cube facing up to the left;
then suddenly it appears as a cube facing down to the right. One can see the
drawing as one cube or the other, or even as a set of lines on a flat surface –
but one always sees it as something.
It is not that there is first an un-interpreted grid of pixels (sense data)
that someone subsequently interprets as one of the cubes. Rather, the
perception of the image is always given as meaningful and tacitly interpreted.
Then it can be either re-interpreted or the 
interpretation can be explicated: put into
words, made a focus of attention and further elaborated.
5.4. Interpretive perspectives
Meaning and
interpretation are always intertwined. Artifacts and utterances are immediately
perceived as being meaningful. They are given from the start as perceived
within a certain interpretation – however vague or confused. The interpretation
may be made explicit and further elaborated – but it must always be grounded in
the given meaning of the artifact or utterance within its context. For the
purposes of this chapter’s theory we make a somewhat arbitrary and potentially
contentious distinction between meaning and interpretation. We say that the meaning is defined for the community involved in the given
situation and that the individuals each develop their own interpretation
of that meaning. (This distinction is worked out in more detail in (Stahl, 2003)).
How do students learn? In our sample data we see how the
students learn the meaning embedded in the list artifact through their
collaborative interpretive processes. They make explicit the features of the
list to each other by interpreting it (as “different”) and stating references
(“compare two and one”).
As researchers studying classroom data, we can develop an
explicit interpretation of the group meaning by analyzing the network of
relationships constructed by the group discourse, taking the group as a whole
as our unit of analysis. We call this network the situation. Every artifact, action, word or utterance obtains its
meaning from its position within this interactive situation.
Alternatively, as researchers we can develop an explicit
interpretation of a specific individual participant’s interpretation by analyzing
the behavior and utterances observed in that individual’s trajectory within the
group interaction, taking that individual as our unit of analysis. We call this
individual trajectory the interpretive
perspective of that person. We say that the person interprets the group
meanings from that perspective.
Roughly stated, meaning exists in the world, determined by
the situation, and participants interpret that meaning individually from their
personal perspectives. Of course, both the situation and the perspectives are
constructed interactively and may be constantly evolving and interacting with
each other. As we shall see in section 6, meanings may be embodied in artifacts
and sedimented in language, but they were originally constructed through interpretive
processes and their significance must be re-constructed by new participants who
build knowledge with them in the future.
It is not so much that meaning is “in the world” like a
separate set of objects, but that things in the world always appear as meaningful.
The students saw the list of rockets as meaningful from the start; to them, it
was obviously a designed object with human meaning embedded in its form and its
content. Brent understood some, but not all of its meaning; through
interpretation (of one entry as “different”)
he articulated the initial meaning and thereby increased his understanding of
it.
5.5. Negotiating knowledge
Our transcript begins with the mentor asking, “And you
don’t have anything like that there?” Our analysis of the transcript interprets
the meaning of “like that” to refer to a pair of rockets that differ only by
nose cone type, such as rockets 1 and 2. But our analysis also claims that this
phrase is initially interpreted differently from the various student
perspectives. Because group meaning has to be interpreted by individual
participants from their own perspectives, there are many possibilities for
divergence and misunderstanding.
The openness to interpretive divergence is a powerful
mechanism for creativity in group discourse.[1]
It allows different participants to pursue different interpretive lines of
exploration of shared themes. Such divergence can continue until it becomes
noticeable, possibly causing a breakdown in communication, and the group sets
out to resolve the differences. The various discourse methods for establishing
convergence of interpretation can be considered forms of negotiating knowing.
In our experimental data, prior explicit focus on comparing
rockets 3 and 4 made it hard for the students to see rockets 1 and 2 as the
thing “like that” that the mentor’s question was trying to point out. The
students’ negative responses to the mentor’s hypothetical question apparently
violated the perceived social practices of the classroom and motivated the
negotiation that gradually shifted the group focus to rockets 1 and 2. Once
those rockets were explicitly named, the various interpretive perspectives
aligned their references and further progress followed rapidly.
The much touted synergy
of collaboration has its origin in the negotiation of multiple perspectives.
Different viewpoints on the discourse topic interact, are explored and lead to
novel results. This takes place at the group level of interpretation.
Individual utterances are open to many possible interpretations due to the
ambiguity of their indexical references, the elliptical nature of their
expressions and the openness of their projections. But within the flow of the
group discourse, certain of these possibilities are selected. One person’s
response picks up on one of the possible interpretations of a preceding
utterance and establishes that as its meaning within the discourse. Through
such discourse processes, the meaning of what is said is determined by the
interactions of multiple members of the group, not just by the person who made
a particular utterance. In fact, it is not the individual utterance that
expresses meaning, but the network of consecutive utterances within the
situational context. Thus, the meaning is deeply synergistic, arising through
the intertwining or negotiation of the individual perspectives within the group
situation.
But there are real limits to openness and interpretive
creativity. One can attempt to interpret something and fail. This may be due to
the resistance of reality: Things have meaningful form, particular utility,
specific affordances and cannot be arbitrarily interpreted. Interpretation is a
kind of creation/discovery (Merleau-Ponty, 1955) where one can try different
things but they will not all work. The objectivity of knowledge arises –
gradually and tentatively – through the negotiation with reality and with
multiple interpretive perspectives through discourse. This social interaction
can, for instance, raise issues of evidence or apply standards of scientific
argumentation: Science is itself a prime example of on-going knowledge
negotiation (Donald, 1991; Latour
& Woolgar, 1979).
The status of scientific theories, particularly in the human sciences, does not
contradict their origin in processes of building collaborative knowing, but
rather derives from the nature of those processes as methodologically
structured and intersubjectively accepted.
6. BUILDING KNOWING
Now that the elements of building collaborative knowing
have been introduced – such as artifacts, situation, meaning, interpretation,
tacit knowing, explicit knowing, perspectives and negotiation – we can outline
the process by which groups construct meaning and individuals develop their
understanding.
6.1. Internalization and externalization
According to
Vygotsky (1930/1978, 1934/1986), human intelligence is formed
by individuals internalizing artifacts and language that are generated
socially, that is at the group level. We can think of internalization as the generation of cognitive artifacts (Hutchins, 1999; Norman,
1991).
Here, the term “artifact” refers to symbolic or linguistic as well as physical
or digital artifacts. “Cognitive” means that the artifact has been transformed
into a mental process.
Suppose that one of the students took the data sheet with
the rocket statistics that the group had compiled and he remembered the format
of the matrix of numbers or some of the key statistics. He could later use this
memory to format a data sheet for another project or to make arguments about
rocket design. This memory would then be functioning as a cognitive artifact.
Its affordances would be different from, but derived from the physical data
sheet artifact. Similarly, the students were able to internalize the mentor’s
vocabulary of “different,” “same,” “compare.” By mimicking the mentor’s talk,
the students gradually and with varied success internalized this
mini-language-game of rocket science.
This example suggests that human memory that is commonly
considered to be a biological function is, rather, a complex involving both
inherited capabilities and internalized cognitive artifacts. It is probably
built on a biological base of episodic memory, by which mammals can recall
specific events that took place in their past experience and that may be
similar to some aspect of the present situation. As part of the specifically
human ability to mimic, we also exercise mimetic memory (Donald, 1991), that allows us to imagine
things that are not currently present. The human ability to mediate perception,
memory and behavior – especially generating speech, including eventually self
talk and silent internal speech – greatly extends our capacity to imagine and
express meanings that reference things not in our immediate perceptual
environment (Vygotsky, 1930/1978). In interacting socially to
acquire local language and practices through mimesis, human infants develop an
extensive array of cognitive artifacts, including more sophisticated forms of
memory such as temporally structured narrative memory (Bruner, 1990), that in turn let them
develop more complex physical and mental abilities.
Even the concept of self, for instance, can be viewed as a
cognitive artifact that is socially constructed and internalized through
mimicking. Children learn what is “mine” in contrast to what is someone else’s
and adopt the view of themselves through the eyes of the other (Levinas, 1974/1998;
Mead, 1934/1962).
Hegel (1807/1967) analyses the emergence of
self-consciousness as a result of the creation of physical artifacts produced
for other people, and Marx (1844/1967; 1867/1976) sees self-alienation as a
result of the distortion of such social artifact production in commoditization.
The modern focus on the individual is an historic product of social
organization (Adorno &
Horkheimer, 1945; Jaynes, 1976). So the individual-as-mind is not a primitive
element of theory, but is itself a socially constructed cognitive artifact.
Externalization has often been considered to follow upon internalization,
where prior mental representations are expressed in physical form such as
speech or drawings. But in our theory, which does not speculate about or
hypothesize mental representations, externalization
is simply the fact that meaning is embodied in artifacts and sedimented in language.
It is unnecessary to speculate on the extent to which that meaning had
previously been rehearsed in the internal speech of the people who designed the
artifact or uttered the words. In fact, both in terms of the developmental
process of the human species and that of each person, meanings are generally internalized
first (from some external, inter-personal, group or social form according to
Vygotsky (1930/1978)) before they can be (re-) externalized.
So external meaning generally precedes internal (Hutchins, 1996), rather than the reverse which is
traditionally assumed. We will explore how externalization works in the
following.
6.2. The interpretation of signs and the affordances
of artifacts
The meanings of signs, symbols, terms, phrases, etc.
are built up through use. In our transcript, the term “different” takes on a
specific meaning through the sequence of its occurrences in the discourse. It
is used in conjunction with other terms, in reference to certain rockets, in
various functional grammatical roles, as part of several speech acts. Of
course, it also brings with it meanings from standard conversational English.
All these influences are sedimented
in the term’s meaning for the classroom group – like the layers of sand
sedimented in the Earth’s geology and visible to the knowledgeable eye as
traces of ancient history. Just as sand is compressed and transformed into
impenetrable rock over time, the past uses of a word are compressed into its
meaning (Husserl, 1936/1989). The meaning is shaped by its
history long after the details of its episodic uses have been forgotten. New
speakers of the word must learn to read the nuances of its meaning out of the
occurrences they experience through interpretation.
An artifact embodies
human meaning in its physical form. By definition, an artifact is man-made for
some purpose. Its meaning has been designed into its form by a community for
whom that artifact is part of their culture. The rocket list artifact, for
instance, is a scientific inventory list. It includes a line describing each
rocket in the simulation, systematically arranged to facilitate the
identification of pairs of rockets differing in only one variable from each
other. We say the list “affords” such identification, or that the artifact has
this affordance designed into it. An
affordance is not an objective property of an artifact, but is part of its
meaning for a community of use (Gibson, 1979; Norman,
1990; Wartofsky, 1973/1979). Moreover, it is something that individual
interpreters must learn to see as an affordance: It is only at the end of our
transcript that Chuck can say “I see. I see. I see” about the list artifact’s
affordance.
6.3. The cycle of knowledge building and meaning
making
Building collaborative knowing is a cyclical process
with no beginning or end (see Figure 6). Any episode starts on the basis of an
indefinitely long history of meaning and knowing. It assumes a meaningful
language and a world of artifacts, a situation in which everything is already
interpreted. Whatever is made explicit was already tacitly known and can only
be explicated against an unbounded background of prior understanding – the
“hermeneutic circle” (Heidegger, 1927/1996) means that one can only
interpret what one already has an interpretation of.
In the small group discourses that drive
building knowing, group meanings intertwine subtly with interpretive
perspectives that engage in complex negotiations. Unnoticed, new layers of
meaning are sedimented in shared jargon. Periodically, persistent artifacts
like documents or pictures are produced. If nothing else, cognitive artifacts
are internalized in personal memories, intellectual resources, mental
abilities, minds.
Viewed historically, the process feeds on itself and spirals
exponentially faster. These days, technology mediates the interactions, the artifacts
and the access. Building knowing takes place dramatically differently in a
technologically produced environment, interpreted from scientific perspectives.
The discourse processes in a CSCL discussion forum, for instance, are very
different from those in a face-to-face meeting, partially because they take
place in written rather than spoken language. The transition from oral to
literate society (Ong, 1998) is taking another major step
with computer networked communication. The nature and rate of social
interaction and of the building of collaborative knowing are undergoing rapid
and continuous transformation.
6.4. The interactive construction of knowing, the
situation, temporality
How is an activity system context interactively
achieved by a group discourse? The immediate activity for the collaborative
moment in the transcript was established by the mentor’s rhetorical question.
Both the definition of the immediate task and its accomplishment were carried
out discursively. His question was precisely formulated to define a mini
activity system that could lead to the desired group knowing. The question was
not, however, planned in advance by the mentor, but arose spontaneously as his
reaction to the on-going conversation. His skilful use of such questions was a
discursive, rhetorical resource that he put to use in the specific context in
an effort to further the larger activity. This is an example of how an activity
context was created as a natural and integral consequence of the very on-going
discourse that it structured. That is, the context was not a pre-existing and
immutable institutional structure, nor was it the externalization of someone’s
prior mental representations or plans (Suchman, 1987).
It is characteristic of persistent objects that they distort
or obscure the apparent history of their creation. Marx (1867/1976) pointed this out for
commercial products and called it the “fetishism of commodities.” He argued
that commodities on the market appeared to have an inherent economic value,
whereas his historical, socio-economic analysis showed that their value was
based on social relations among the people who produced and exchanged them.
Similarly, words seem to have some kind of ephemeral other-worldly meaning,
whereas we can deconstruct their meaning and demonstrate how it was constituted
in a history of contextualized uses and networks of relationships to other
words, artifacts and activities. Artifacts, too, seem to come with objective
affordances, but these were designed into them by their creators and must be
learned and interpreted anew by their users.
In our theory, collaborative learning – as the extending of
group knowing – is constructed in social interactions, such as discourse. It is
not a matter of accepting fixed facts, but is the dynamic, on-going, evolving
result of complex interactions, primarily taking place within communities of
people. The building of knowing is always situated; the situation grants
meaning to the activities, language and artifacts that define the extended,
inter-related context. Such a cyclical, dialectical process in which people
construct elements of the very context that conditions their activity and makes
it possible is a process of “social re-production” or “structuration” – the
meaningful social situation reproduces itself interactively (Giddens, 1984). The situation reflects
previous social activities, and is transformed by current interactions and by
projections of the future. Frequently and unnoticed, interactive knowing
crystallizes into seemingly immutable knowledge or facts, just as situated
action coalesces into habitual practices, conventional rules and dominant
institutions.
Even space and time, as the dimensions within which activities
take place, are socially constructed interactively. In section 4.1 above we
characterized the utterances in the transcript as indexical, elliptical and
projective, meaning that they referenced unstated elements of the past, present
and future discourse or its situation. In making such references, the discourse
weaves an implicit pattern of temporal relations. The interactions of a group
narrate the topic of discussion by indexing artifacts in the present situation,
elliptically assuming references to past interaction and projecting possible
futures. Participants in the discourse interpret and understand this woven
temporal pattern as an unnoticed part of their involvement in the discourse. In
this way, the situational network of meaning is structured temporally as what
Husserl (1936/1989), Heidegger (1927/1996) and Schutz (1967) call “lived temporality.” Out
of the social interaction among people, the following elements get produced,
re-produced and habituated: the group itself as an interactive unit, the
individuals as roles and mental subjects, the situation as network of artifacts
and space/time as dimensions of reality.
6.5. The larger social context as constituted by
designed artifacts and sedimented language
This chapter focuses on the micro-processes by which
the social context is constituted: for instance, how words and artifacts get,
preserve and convey their meaning. From these elemental processes that take
place primarily in collaborative group interactions, one could then show how
larger scale social institutions and human cognitive phenomena are built up.
Analyses of the role of artifacts (Bereiter, 2002; Donald,
1991; Geertz, 1973; Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Marx, 1867/1976; Vygotsky,
1930/1978; Wartofsky, 1973/1979) view human culture as consisting of immense
collections of linguistic, physical and technological artifacts. Social
theoreticians (Bourdieu, 1972/1995;
Garfinkel, 1967; Giddens, 1984; Habermas, 1981/1984) show how social institutions
and behavioral codes arise from the elemental processes we have discussed and
become institutionalized into large scale social structures that seem
impervious to human influence. These views could be summarized as arguing that
the social context in which we live is constituted by the products and by-products
of building collaborative knowing – taken on a global, historical scale. Just
as our own behavior and cognitive skills as individuals are products of group
interaction, so the large social structures are interactively achieved,
reproduced and reinterpreted in the momentary practices of communities.
This chapter has attempted to present core elements of a
social theory of CSCL. In bringing together terms and approaches from existing
theories influential within CSCL work, it has tried to describe some of the
micro-processes (like synergy) that are often left as unexplained mysteries in
other writings. Section 1 argued for the need to develop CSCL theory. Section 2
provided an empirical example of building collaborative knowing to guide our
thinking. Section 3 suggested an answer to the epistemological question of how
collaborative knowing is possible by pointing to group interaction as its
source. Section 4 analyzed the semiotics of meaning in terms of the situation
as a network of relations among words, artifacts and activities. Section 5
addressed hermeneutic issues of interpretation with the ideas of background
tacit knowing, personal perspectives and knowledge negotiation. Finally, this
Section brought these concepts together to see how knowing evolves through a
cycle involving externalization of knowing in artifacts and internalization as
cognitive artifacts, all within a broader context of social institutions and
community culture; this defines an ontology of meaningful physical objects and
human abilities that develop through interaction with other people within the common
meaningful world. The chapter will conclude with a reflection on the practical
implications of this theory for the field of CSCL.
7. IMPLICATIONS FOR CSCL METHODOLOGY, PRACTICE AND DESIGN
Once we understand that the nature of learning and the
educational institutions that structure it are evolving historical products, we
can discuss how to transform them by carefully designing the language and artifacts
of future interactions for building collaborative knowing. That is the goal of
CSCL and of this book.
7.1. The empirical analysis of collaborative
learning
The evaluation of computer-supported collaborative
learning involves the perspectives of three communities: the designers, the
learners and the researchers.
The designers of
software technology (such as web discussion forums), curricular materials
(including web content) and classroom activities (e.g., teacher lesson plans)
attempt to provide a structured context in which the collaborative building of
knowing will take place in a certain way and with a certain subject matter
focus. Their perspective may be documented in software user manuals or
curriculum guides, for instance. Their perspective may be more or less grounded
in some version of CSCL theory. We may consider these designers to be the
practitioners of CSCL.
Learners engage
in the collaborative building of knowing under the conditions established by
the designers. We have seen in our analysis of the sample data of a small group
of learners that they must make their learning visible to each other in their
discourse in order for them to collaborate successfully. Typically, this
learning is not made explicit, but is implicit in the discourse; however, it
can be interpreted by researchers through careful analysis of captured data (Fischer & Granoo,
1995).
The learning tends to be made more visible in cases of temporary breakdown of
group understanding, when it becomes necessary to repair the sharing of
references, etc. An important part of the learners’ effort to build knowing is
their engagement in understanding the meaning of the situation in which they
find themselves, including understanding the affordances of the artifacts that
they have to work with and the sedimented meanings of the terms they are given
in texts, both spoken and written. This is an interpretive effort on their
part. While they need to interpret the artifacts and terms, they do not
necessarily have to interpret the perspectives of the designers of those artifacts
and terms. Nevertheless, there must exist some sort of an interpretive horizon
that connects the situation of the learners and the designers (Gadamer, 1960/1988). One possible way to forge
this connection is through user-centered design methods. The learners form the
CSCL user community.
Through interpretation of the meaning of the designed artifacts
and of the captured usage discourse, researchers
have access to the learning that takes place and to the perspectives of the
designers and of the learners. Digital videotape facilitates the capture and
analysis of multi-modal data from the learners. The fact that collaborative
learning necessarily makes the learning visible provides the methodological
basis for empirical analysis by researchers. Researchers of collaborative
learning are not restricted to indirect evidence of learning (such as pre- and
post-test differences) because they can analyze and interpret the making of
meaning as it unfolds in the data at the group level and in individual
trajectories of utterances. The analysis of discourse and more generally the
deconstruction of human institutions as socially constructed become powerful
methods of empirical analysis (Berger & Luckmann,
1967; Duranti, 1998; Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984; Sacks, 1992). In addition, to the extent that the
learners produce non-linguistic persistent artifacts, these can be brought into
the analysis along with all forms of communicative interaction (gesture, pose,
intonation, eye contact, etc.) (Streeck, 1983). Of course, the analysis must also take
into account the activity structure and other socio-historical context in which
the learning takes place. These researchers are the CSCL theoreticians and
evaluators.
Other chapters will provide concrete suggestions for
thinking about and analyzing the designer, learner and researcher perspectives,
whose theoretical foundations have been indicated here.
7.2. Classroom practices in higher education
Our guiding example was one of middle school students
interacting face-to-face. In moving to computer-mediated interactions in higher
education, many specifics of the interaction change, but important features
still hold. In the following example, a group of students is working on their
first assignment in an online college course. They are designing a web page to
represent their group, interacting through a threaded discussion system:
Pat (
Draft design is posted in the
folder “PowerPoint contributions”. Concept is “From afar, to a new home” – map
shows where we all came from, destination is just shown as Tech.
I think destination Tech is
great, Is there anything I can do?
Boris
(
This is perfect to go with our
bios.
What are we doing for the first
page? And name?
Boris
(
Look up demo put by Pat at her
final web link. The name was “Super Stars”, I think.
Pat
(
Is my map marker reasonably close
to
Boris
(
I think it’s perfect.
Discourse in this medium allows a person to contribute to
multiple threads simultaneously and multiple people to contribute to the same
thread at the same time. The utterances tend to be longer, more carefully
formulated in grammatical sentences. Nevertheless, there can be quick responses
(see first pair above) and many of the same accomplishments can be achieved as
in face-to-face, such as proposing, clarifying, negotiating and agreeing.
Furthermore, the utterances still often have the indexical, elliptical and
projective characteristics. For instance, Pat’s act in the first message above
announced the posting of a page that was being proposed as a first page with a
name for the group. Although
Students at the level of higher education may already have
most of the skills and background understanding necessary to engage in building
collaborative knowing in a professional way. Education at this level can
consist largely in guided apprenticeship in practicing typical examples of
building knowing that are accepted within the field that the students are
studying. For instance, small groups of medical students can engage in the
collaborative diagnosis of medical cases. Here, problem-based learning (Barrows, 1994) has proven effective by
selecting a large set of typical cases covering the major areas of medicine and
motivating the student groups to delve deeply into the considerations needed to
make informed decisions about these representative cases.
As implied by this chapter, the important thing is to engage
the students in collaborative discourse. Without guidance and a motivating
context, a group of students will rarely achieve the building of deep knowing.
The teacher’s role is to scaffold and guide the learning activities with
carefully designed activities (structures), texts (language) and technologies (artifacts).
In interpreting the meanings of these, the students will discursively build
their group and individual understanding of the situation as a network of
inter-relationships. Over time, this interpreted situation will provide the
background knowing they will need to function productively in their future
worlds.
7.3. The design of technology for CSCL
There are many reasons to use computer-based
information and communication technology (ICT) in education. CSCL artifacts
should be designed with these explicitly in mind, for instance:
To provide new media for supporting, structuring and scaffolding
discourse and collaboration in ways that foster the building of collaborative
knowing.
To facilitate the intertwining of interpretive perspectives
by allowing comparison of knowledge built by groups, smaller teams and
individuals.
To support knowledge negotiation by collaborative groups.
To avoid the teacher bottleneck – where all communication
must go through the teacher – by offering multiple paths for students to
interact with each other directly.
To avoid the teacher bottleneck – where all progress depends
on teachers dispensing knowledge – by providing linguistic, cognitive and
digital artifacts for students to interact with and internalize.
To present new teachable moments or learning moments – relevant
experiences – within simulated professional situations.
Just as desktop computer applications have increased the
ability of individuals, corporations and institutions to compile, manipulate
and visualize large and complex sets of information, networked CSCL
applications have the potential to engage groups in building collaborative
knowing on a scale previously unimaginable. With asynchronous communication, a
hierarchical leader is no longer needed to control sequential interactions;
discourse can proceed in a many-to-many fashion, with people participating
whenever and wherever they like. Communities can expand virtually, overcoming
geographic limitations. Perhaps most significantly, computer mediation can
provide tools for dealing with the increasing complexity of information and
decision-making.
A system to support the collaborative building of knowing
might include support for such functions as:
Collaboration:
facilitating complex interactions, helping participants to maintain an overview
of them, allowing participants to negotiate group decisions and building tacit
knowing on the group level.
Social awareness:
displaying or comparing alternative interpretations of different participants
in collaboration and keeping track of who knows or does what, when, where.
Knowledge building:
accumulating, storing, organizing, preserving and displaying multi-media artifacts
that arise in interaction.
Knowledge management:
the ability to collect items from broad discourses and organize them flexibly
according to various perspectives for further manipulation and sharing.
Apprenticeship:
defining tasks, activities and learning goals, simulating pedagogically
meaningful experiences and monitoring progress.
In designing CSCL systems, we can conceptualize the software
as innovative media for group discourse – as artifacts that structure
interaction and that must themselves be learned. The systems must be designed along
with pedagogical activity systems to contextualize their use. They should aim
at facilitating the collaborative building of knowing by user communities. They
should promote the internalization by individuals of cognitive artifacts that
transform the use of the CSCL artifacts and of the knowing that arises through
their use.
7.4. This chapter as a theory artifact
This chapter has not presented a comprehensive and
accepted theory. Rather, it has attempted to point in one possible direction
for developing a theoretical framework for CSCL. Part of this theory is an
understanding of how meaning is collaboratively constructed, preserved and
re-learned through the media of language and artifacts – in group interaction.
This research complex has barely begun to be explored. To the extent that it
has been studied, this has been primarily outside the context of computer
mediation or higher education. So, for instance, we desperately need careful
investigations of how computer-supported discourse in higher education differs
from face-to-face discourse in daily conversation and how students learn the
affordances of CSCL artifacts.
If we self-apply our theory of building collaborative
knowing to the process of theorizing about collaboration, we immediately see
the importance of coining descriptive terminology, designing effective artifacts
and reflecting upon these as a collaborative community in order to achieve the
potential of CSCL. Hopefully, new researchers can leverage the presented
concepts to collaboratively extend the knowing sedimented in this book.
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