Facilitators:

Dan Suthers

University of Hawaii

suthers@hawaii.edu

Cindy Hmelo-Silver

Rutgers University

Collaborative Learning Workshops at CSCL 2003

Summary

Participants will examine how CSCL environments can be designed to provide affordances for knowledge building discourse and the issues in helping learners take advantage of those affordances. The workshop will begin with a demo fair of several CSCL systems, followed by discussions about the utility of external representations such as semantic maps or argumentation graphs, the relationship between discussion tools and other representations, coordination among multiple communication spaces, and the role of facilitators.

Description

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of CSCL systems intended to promote knowledge-building discourse. These often involve multiple communication spaces and channels, may be integrated into domain-specific learning environments, and may seek to relate discussion to strategic artifacts. This workshop will examine issues of representation and interaction design that bear on support for productive, knowledge-building discourse. For example:

1. How does one facilitate coordination among multiple communication spaces?
2. How does the design of these different spaces promote different kinds of discursive interactions?
3. Do representations that include more or less domain-specific guidance lead to different sorts of knowledge-building activities?
4. How can different ways of implementing artifact-centered discussions affect knowledge building?
5. What is the role of the human facilitator in helping learners take advantage of the affordances of different kinds of discussion spaces (as well as helping them coordinate the use of these spaces)?
6. And importantly, how can these questions help us build theories about the role of tools in learning?

In this full-day workshop, participants will be invited to set up demonstrations of systems that they are using, and will spend part of the morning in a demo fair. This session will conclude with participants helping to create a set of dimensions for comparison of the systems. Grounded in the examples provided by the systems, the afternoon will continue with a set of presentations and discussions about how representational guidance was used to provide affordances for knowledge building discourse and the issues in helping learners take advantage of those affordances. Brief presentations by selected participants will focus the discussion on key issues in design of computational support for knowledge building. The session will conclude with a discussion of questions about representational guidance and coordination.

Potential participants should send a note to the organizers that explain how the workshop is relevant to their work, whether they would like to do a demo, and if they would like to do a demo, a brief description of the system (as well as system requirements for the demo).