CSCL- Two case studies

An alternative to the view of common ground based on convergence of mental models

• Western metaphor of “seeing as knowing in a deep way” (analogy of the cave)
• small infant and mother, pointing, looking at something together
• case study, 3 students establish and maintain intersubjective understanding of a math problem, which they solve as a group

• intersubjectivity - how a group of people understand the same thing
• precondition of collaborative learning is that participants understand each other enough to do their work
• includes tacit background knowledge and explicit shared understanding of the current topic
• in cognitive science, grounding of shared understanding is treated as the explicit comparisons of mental models or internal opinions, but we think it is the result of interactional work in which a shared world is created and various methods are used to ensure a sharing of this world

• we are all in a world
• we learn about and experience the many dimensions of this world together, as mature social beings
• the “problem” of establishing inter-subjectivity is a pseudo-problem in most cases
• human existence is fundamentally intersubjective from the very beginning
• a problem that arose in philosophy, because philosophers thought about things the wrong way

• you are not really embodied with other people
• all you see is the computer screen

• list of people - presence
• chat: every posting starts with name of person
• you get a sense of who individual people are, and how they view what is going on in the environment

• how do people who met online create a shared world in which they can understand things the same?
• how do their online actions (chat and drawing) build a joint problem space of actors, places, times and social relationships
• how do they raise issues of understanding, repair misunderstandings, share personal perspectives
• “joint problem-space” (Jeremy Roschelle)

• choose small chat transcript, analyze it collaboratively as a team, line by line

• someone invents a new term, how does the group get to understand this term, and use it as a common referent? (hexagonal array)
• how do students use questions to establish intersubjectivity? (Nan Zhou looked at this)
• students taking turns in making knowledge advances - not one person solving and explaining to others
• moving back and forth between different representations (graphical, algebraic etc)

• open shared worl with external representation - joint problem space visually shared
• orient everyone to specific object for mutual discussion
• make a particular pattern visually relevant
• discuss pattern in words
• signify pattern in mathematical symbols and manipulate them
• each participant understands the resources, methods and steps well enough to use them individually in the future
• features and affordances of CSCL media and environment used to support intersubjectivity and group cognition:
  • persistent text chat
  • shared whiteboard
  • line color & thickness
  • pointing tool

• individual
• group
• classroom: group posts results to wiki, shared with other groups - interaction between small groups

• from book: all individuals try to solve a problem, nobody are able to, then go into team, are able to

• hierarchy of level of temporal structure for online collaboration
• sequential structure of collaborative math discourse
• VMT case study
• 10 discourse moves in detail
• group cognition in math

• conversational topic (longer sequence)
• discourse move (sequentical accomplishment built on elementary interchange)
• adjacency pair (base interaction involving two or three utterances, which drives a discourse move)
• textual utterance (a text chat posting by an individual participant, which may contribute to an adjacency pair)
• indexical reference (an element of a textual utterance that points to a resource in the context)

• conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff), discourse analysis (Gee)
• all verbal communication involves adjacency pairs – how do small groups create knowledge together through “longer sequences”
• conversation analysis focses on how people construct their interactions with turn taking and adjacency-pair
• usually analyzes American adults in informal settings
• needs to be adapted to online text chat

• Vygotsky said “people can solve problems in groups long before they can solve problems individually”
• Someone should develop ways of testing groups of students
• How do you measure quality of collaboration, and avoid one person dominating the group?
• Coding based on different theories (I don't do that). Many people assign roles to avoid someone dominating. An adult in the chat room could be a facilitator. We had people in the chat, who were mainly answering questions about the technology. Intelligent agents. Visualize collaboration statistics to make students “self-police”.
• Stahl feels like humans are good at group processes, so just lets them “do their own thing”. Works out over a period of time.