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The following is an excerpt from a proposal to the ROLE program of the NSF. Theory of the Synergistic MomentWe are interested in a distinct process of group learning that we term collaborative knowledge-building. Here, groups of people construct new knowledge through interaction of their ideas and perspectives, usually eventually preserved in documents or other artifacts. We want to understand the unique potential of collaborative learning for the construction of new, robust knowledge structures. Our theory of collaborative knowledge-building (Stahl, 2000) proposes a concept we call the synergistic moment; we intend to investigate the validity of this concept in the proposed project. The synergistic moment is a critical period during collaboration in which a group constructs meaning that transcends what any participant may have “in mind.” The shared understanding that is generated in this process is a subtle phenomenon: It does not mean that everyone is in complete agreement or even that each individual has the same internal cognitive representations of what is being discussed. Rather, it means that a certain view has been expressed which now forms a topic for the group. The unit of analysis for describing this is the group (rather than the individual thinker), and is manifested in the group's discourse (rather than in mental states or cognitive representations). Individuals may agree to disagree with the group understanding, and careful investigation may reveal that individual understandings differ from the group's view (Hatano & Inagaki, 1991) . The intersubjective "sharing" is not a correspondence or overlapping of individuals' mental content, but a coordination or interaction of their participation in joint socio-cultural activity (Matusov, 1996) .The synergistic moment is an emergent property of the group dialog as a cacophony of voices (Bakhtin, 1986) . It could easily pass unnoticed as a magical fount of creativity; to more deeply understand it requires "thick description” (Geertz, 1973) and detailed interaction/discourse analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), and therefore presupposes that the interaction was captured in some medium. While the literature on CSCL contains a number of incisive analyses of collaborative learning (e.g., Roshelle, 1996) , they do not highlight the synergistic moment as such.
The synergistic moment is a result of perspective-sharing (Boland & Tenkasi, 1995) , but at the group rather than the individual level. It overcomes the problem pointed out by Feltovich et al. (1996) , that any one perspective may limit the ability to comprehend creatively the complexity of a topic under discussion. What typically happens is that one person makes a statement from her personal perspective; someone else interprets that statement from his own perspective and responds accordingly; others continue this process so that the discourse consists implicitly of reinterpretations from various perspectives. The drive to establish intersubjectivity and shared knowledge is powered by socio-cognitive conflict and contention among perspectives according to studies by Piaget and his followers (Perret-Clermont & Schubauer-Leoni, 1981) . The dialog proceeds through sequential turn-taking and attempts to repair “misunderstandings” as understood from particular perspectives and reinterpreted from others. Thanks to the human drive to impose coherent social meaning structures, a synergistic group understanding emerges which, as a result of the debate, has overcome limitations of the various individual perspectives. This shared understanding can play a central role in the further activity of the group and can be more or less adopted by individuals into their personal perspectives. Although the synergistic moment seems to the participants to emerge spontaneously, it can be understood as the result of many identifiable knowledge-building activities, as shown in our model (below). Our theory, represented in this diagram, attempts to understand how the group understanding that arises in the synergistic moment (right hand column of diagram) interacts with the personal perspectives of the group members (left hand column). A wide variety of devices in the physical world are imbued with cultural significance and function as media for the sharing of ideas (middle column). Spoken language is the most obvious medium, with its complex layers of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, intonation, gesture, and innuendo. Recent research in the cognitive sciences (Hutchins, 1996) indicates how much people rely on traces in the physical world and on other people to constitute and store knowledge. These days, new electronic devices to mediate communication and knowledge are flooding the market; however, none of them are designed to support the set of activities that contribute to the synergistic moment. Computer software designed to support collaborative knowledge-building has the potential of transforming the activities underlying the synergistic moment. For one thing, it would make those activities publicly accessible. The group could then reflect upon the emergence of its shared understanding by looking over the persistent record of its dialog. Such reflection might prove especially useful in contentious situations or for newcomers who were not part of the original dialog and are motivated to re-open the issue – as illustrated by Matusov (1996) . Furthermore, computer support of perspectives could make explicit the interplay of different personal perspectives and the migration of ideas and their interpretations between personal and group perspectives. Ironically, perhaps, the “asynchronous” medium of the Web would allow group members to interact simultaneously – without waiting for sequential turns. Of course, as we have already discovered with the Web in general, the increased flood of ideas raises complex information management issues that require their own software functionality. Theories of human cognitive development emphasize the important role of external memories to extend short-term and long-term human memory (Donald, 1991; Norman, 1993) . They also stress that individual cognition is a social product, highly mediated by social symbol systems, cultural artifacts, processes of structuration, and interpersonal collaboration (Bourdieu, 1972/1995; Geertz, 1973; Giddens, 1984; Vygotsky, 1930/1978) . This suggests that computer support for collaboration has the potential to significantly advance the power of human cognition. In addition to maintaining a persistent external memory, it can help people to be more reflective and creative – as has been demonstrated in computer support for brainstorming and decision-making (Connolly, 1997; Vogel et al., 1987) . However, as our research to date indicates, despite the fact that the Web seems to offer a promising technological base for such a development, computer-supported collaboration is a complex process that requires a sophisticated body of knowledge that we are just beginning to assemble. We believe that computer support for collaborative knowledge-building has not yet been developed to near its potential. As yet there has been no systematic attempt to support the variety of activities that are involved in knowledge-building. There is no general theory of collaborative knowledge-building as a social process. Existing research tends to target specific contexts like middle school science with specialized closed software systems, rather than developing versatile software that supports core structures of collaboration but can be customized and applied in a full range of contexts. The proposed project is part of a larger research agenda to develop such technology. Technology SupportIn the following chart we have listed some of the activities that are important to collaborative knowledge-building according to our theory. Next to each activity is a suggested form of computer support, followed in the final column by the name of a software prototype that has been developed to provide such support.
The chart only lists software prototyped at L3D, but we intend to study the use of other collaboration software as well, including commercial systems like NetMeeting, WebCT, LearningSpace and systems developed by researchers with whom we collaborate: WISE (Berkeley), CoWeb (Georgia Tech), Belvedere (Hawaii), DocReview (Washington), D3E (England), BCSCW (Germany), FLE (Finland), Docta (Norway), CSILE (Canada). Graduate seminars typically deal with defining terminology and reviewing academic literature. Therefore it is not surprising that systems like DynaSites (DynaClass, DynaGloss, DynaSource) and DocReview include support for an interactive glossary and an annotated bibliography integrated with discussion. DynaGloss, for instance, allows group members to modify and/or annotate definitions of terms, and also to view the history of definitions and annotations of the term. Terms defined in DynaGloss can be used as keywords in DynaSource and can function as live links to the definition in DynaClass discussions. An entry in DynaGloss also points to every occurrence of that term as a keyword or link throughout the DynaSites system, providing an index to potentially related materials. This is an example of how computer mediation can guide collaboration by encouraging adoption of a shared vocabulary while still allowing the flexibility to revise the meaning of a term at any time or reflect upon it in a persistent way. In the early part of the project we will study primarily examples of face-to-face collaboration and seminars using commercial software to mediate collaboration. In later parts we will use versions of WebGuide so that we can control the functionality that is included. WebGuide is a Web-based communication medium developed by the PI during the past two years. Its primary difference from other discussion support systems (e.g., DynaClass or CSILE) is its support for personal and group perspectives, which is an important structure of collaboration in our theory (Stahl, 1999) . Development of support for negotiation in WebGuide is currently underway. The WebGuide system is also being reworked to facilitate the integration of components developed by other researchers, so that versions with different sets of functionality can be easily assembled for experiments in seminars.
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