Guidelines on Data Preparation
The data session
The session will consist primarily of group discussion by all participants. The point is to bring diverse interpretive perspectives, research interests and theoretical proclivities to bear on an interesting data excerpt of collaborative interaction in a CSCL setting (see Jordan & Henderson, 1995). The focus should be on how the material conditions of CSCL interaction can be seen at work in the excerpt.
Selecting a data excerpt
The excerpt you select for the data session should not be something for which you have previously published an analysis (or for which you are already prepared to publish an analysis). It should be something relatively new and fresh, something that you find to be both provocative and relevant to CSCL research interests. We will only have 90 minutes to devote to each data session (including intros, multiple viewings/readings, collaborative discussions and wrap up), so our time for in-depth exploration is limited. You should therefore select a brief episode, which can be discussed in detail in this timeframe.
Preparing video
If you have video of the data, make sure it can be played and heard loudly and clearly on the computer that you bring to the session (. Be prepared to play it multiple times and stop it at key points. If you have a software replayer for the data, make sure it can be played on your computer. In most cases, the video or replayer should not be longer than two or three minutes, preferably much less.
Transcripts
You will need to bring 15 copies of a working transcript for your data fragment. The transcript should be brief enough to fit on a single page. We have found CA-style transcripts (see Ford, 1999 or Koshik, 2002 for examples) to be most useful as tools to support productive exploration in the data sessions. The most crucial information for analytic purposes is a carefully transcribed record of the talk, accurate speaker attribution and a record of the timing of the utterances. If you have never done a CA transcript before, the conference organizers can provide assistance. If your data is not English-based, see Hayashi (2003) for an example of how to provide an English gloss within your transcript. We are also interested in innovations in transcription.
References
Ford, C. (1999). Collaborative construction of task activity: Coordinating multiple resources in a high school physics lab. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 32(4), 369-408.
Hayashi, M. (2003). Language and the body as resources for collaborative action: A Study of word searches in Japanese conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 36(2), 109-142.
Jordan, B., & Henderson, A. (1995). Interaction analysis: Foundations and practice. Journal of the Learning Sciences. 4(1), 39-103.
Koshik, I. (2002). Designedly incomplete utterances: A pedagogical practice for eliciting knowledge displays in error correction sequences. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 35(3), 277-309.