>> 1. What type of learning activity are you supporting with discussions ?

My WebGuide system for supporting collaborative knowledge-building is designed to support the collaborative building of deep, innovative, shared knowledge within a community. This is perhaps easiest to define by comparison. It is not superficial chat, aimed at socializing. Nor is it simple question and answer that assumes someone already knows an answer. The hope is more that one person will state something and then others will respond to this, interpreting the statement from their own perspective. Innovative ideas will emerge through a series of reinterpretations, new insights, misinterpretations/repairs/negotiations, and words from one perspective triggering thoughts from another. I call this emergent property of the community discourse a "synergistic moment".

>> 2.  Why is this type of activity hard for students ?

a. Level of complexity. I think that collaboration is very difficult and rarely successful in real life. It involves a complex social process. If N people are involved, there are N! one-on-one social relationships to maintain, let alone groupings of subgroups that relate to other subgroups in various ways. I must understand what N different people say, which means understanding where each of them is coming from. And I must also understand the group dynamics and why certain things are expressed and other things are taken for granted. This is all necessary if I am to understand what is being said, what mistakes are taking place, and what is of interest to me from my perspective. Dialog is hard enough to understand another complex human being and maintain a discursive relationship with them. But small groups are exponentially harder. Larger groups are impossible, and therefore have traditionally required social hierarchies and authorities to make them work at all.

b. Tacit, hidden nature. Much of what we need to keep track of in collaborative knowledge-building is either ephemeral or tacit either it never appears or it quickly disappears. People's interpretive perspectives, like their personalities, are hypothesized composites pieced together from hints in their behavior or their pronouncements. Even the hints that make their appearance in discourse fade as the discussion continues and everyone's memory grows dim.

c. Folk theories. It is hard for students to grasp that there may be alternative perspectives on a subject -- and that that's OK. Folk theories of truth assume that there is a unique truth in every matter and that its truthfulness is not affected by interpretive perspectives and vocabularies used to state the truth. Folk theories of mind assume that everyone thinks the same and understands sentences the same and sees truth the same -- with exceptional cases like people who are stupid, crazy, or weird.

>> 3.  How can discussions help students succeed in this type of activity ?

Discussions in groups can provide experience with recognizing multiplicities of perspectives, with the building of one's own perspectives, with the establishment of social relationships in discourse, with the critical and/or productive conflict among perspectives.

My hope for knowledge-building environments is that they will allow groups to make some of the structure of the process visible, public, subject to reflection and comment. WebGuide features a representation of personal, subgroup and group perspectives so that participants can view content associated with each other's perspective. Of course, all discussions are persistent and asynchronous, so that people can review exactly what was said and can add to it at any time.

>> 4.  What types of challenges do teachers and students face when discussing

>> topics related to the activity?  How do teachers set-up, introduce and

>> successfully run this type of discussion?

In one use of WebGuide in a middle school, the teacher defined the topic, collected resources on the topic, specified 5 conflicting perspectives on the topic, enlisted adults representing the different perspectives to be interviewed by the students. The students were assigned in groups to research and formulate one of the perspectives. In this way, the perspectival nature of the topic was made explicit and the software was used to formulate the beliefs of each perspective in a persistent, browsable format. (This use of WebGuide is discussed in my AERA '99 paper at http//GerryStahl.net/publications/ conferences/1999/aera99/  )

>> 5.  How can a teacher assess discussions from an individual and a group perspective?

A teacher can try to understand the evolution of a knowledge-building discussion at the group level and then try to see how each student's contributions related to that shared understanding did the student seem to understand what was going on and to contribute to it productively? Did the student have problems relating on a social level (e.g., shyness) or an interpretive level?

A related question is how a researcher can assess this. In a face-to-face discussion, micro-analysis of the discourse based on video and transcripts can provide insight. In a computer mediated discussion, one can analyze the thread structure. Long threads presumably indicate depth. What is the distribution of contributions?