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Questions posed by the six international student groups about the chapter.
Group 1How is it possible to make sure or to know that the common ground for collaboration has been established? Is it possible to measure if learners have reached the goal of collaborative learning? Group 2Should we divide traditional learning from CSCL? Should we say CSCL is about building collaborative knowing, not another way to learn? Then we should need to change the name CSCL to something that doesn't include the word "learning". How can we ever understand each other? What we mean is not what others understand we meant. It takes a lot of conversation to realize what the point was. Is one point of collaborative work to clarify our thoughts to others, to make the thoughts explicit? But in the end, when do we know when others have interpreted us right? Or when do you know you have interpreted right what someone else has stated? Group 3Stahl points out that some 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." This got me thinking about the different types of utterances (indexical, elliptical and projective) that he mentions later on in the paper (p. 12) - has any research been done concerning the proportions of the different kinds of utterances that occur in successful and less successful collaborative learning situations respectively? Stahl writes (p. 80) "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." What are these skills and background understanding? Understanding about a certain domain which students are studying or understanding about collaborative knowledge building? Group 4What new things does your idea of building knowing add to the older learning theories (or socio-cultural learning)?" A social theory of learning is a key element for CSCL, as stated in the article. Do you think that because of the increasing use of technology in teaching (and other activities, too) the social theory will be dominant in research on learning? Or is it already? Group 5How to build a joint meaning for example in a CSCL course where the social awareness of each other is quite thin after all and many culture-specific differences exist? In that case, how can a teacher/tutor support interaction and collaboration? Group 6To what degree can cross-cultural differences limit the effectiveness of CSCL? What are the two main points that Gerry himself would raise from his article?
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