Introductions to ijCSCL
Gerry Stahl
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Copyright 2010 Gerry Stahl
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Volume table of contents
1(1): ijCSCL – a journal for research in CSCL
1(2): Building knowledge in the classroom, building knowledge in the CSCL community
1(3): Focusing on participation in group meaning making
1(4): Social practices of computer-supported collaborative learning
2(1): Welcome to the future: ijCSCL volume 2
2(2&3): A double issue for CSCL 2007
2(4): CSCL and its flash themes
3(2): The strength of the lone wolf
3(3): Explorations of participation in discourse
4(2): Practice perspectives in CSCL
4(3): Classical dialogs in CSCL
4(4): Paradigms of shared knowledge
5(2): A prism of CSCL research
5(3): Guiding group cognition in CSCL
5(4): Beyond folk theories of CSCL
This volume reproduces the editorial introductions to the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (ijCSCL) since its beginning in 2006. The introductions situate the articles in each quarterly issue within current CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) research activity and highlight the unique perspectives and important contributions of the included papers. The introductions also present reflections on topics of CSCL theory and methodology, providing concise contributions of their own. Written in different styles, the introductions as an ensemble provide a lively, stimulating introduction to the CSCL research field as it has grown over the years.
The introductions were written by Gerry Stahl in collaboration with Friedrich Hesse. Stahl and Hesse are the Executive Editors of ijCSCL. The versions reproduced here are the prepublication versions, without the layout and pagination of the final published versions.
ijCSCL was established by the international CSCL research community in 2005 and began publication through Springer in 2006. It is published quarterly in print as well as electronically on the websites of Springer and ijCSCL. The CSCL community is active around the world and supports the journal though an Editorial Board of about 50 leading researchers and another 100 regular reviewers.
ijCSCL is an official publication of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS); subscription to ijCSCL is available to members of ISLS for free—see http://ISLS.org for further information about the organization and membership.
ijCSCL is published quarterly by Springer; electronic versions of all articles are available to subscribers and through many university libraries at http://www.springerlink.com/content/120055.
Pre-publication versions of all articles are available for free to the world at the ijCSCL website—see http://ijCSCL.org for further information about the journal, instructions for submitting manuscripts, and pre-publication copies of articles.
ijCSCL is now rated the #2 educational journal in the world. In September 2010, the ISI Web of Science released its annual report that ijCSCL has an impact factor of 2.692, the second highest impact factor of the 139 ISI-indexed journals in the category “Education and Educational Research.” This was the first time that ijCSCL was rated by ISI. The rating reflected ijCSCL articles published in 2007 and 2008 and cited by ISI-indexed journals in 2009.
All publications of Gerry Stahl are available at http://GerryStahl.net/publications. Materials about CSCL and the international CSCL conferences are available at http://GerryStahl.net/cscl. A CSCL Community blog is available at http://cscl-community.blogspot.com.
Contents of journal issues
International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (ijCSCL)
Volume 1, Number 1, March 2006
ijCSCL—a journal for research in CSCL
Gerry Stahl & Friedrich Hesse
3-7
The CSCL community in its first decade: Development, continuity, connectivity
Andrea Kienle & Martin Wessner (Germany)
9-33
A relational, indirect and meso level approach to CSCL design in the next decade
Chris Jones (UK), Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld (Denmark), & Berner Lindström (Sweden)
35-56
Student assessing their own collaborative knowledge building
Eddy Y. C. Lee (China), Carol K. K. Chan (China), & Jan van Aalst (Canada)
57-87
Situating CoWeb: A scholarship of application
Jochen Rick & Mark Guzdial (US)
89-115
R-U-Typing-2-Me? Evolving a chat tool to increase understanding in learning activities
Hugo Fuks, Mariano Pimentel, & Carlos José Pereira de Lucena (Brazil)
117-142
A dialogical understanding of the relationship between CSCL and teaching thinking skills
Rupert Wegerif (UK)
143-157
* * *
Volume 1, Number 2, June 2006
Building knowledge in the classroom, building knowledge in the CSCL community
Gerry Stahl & Friedrich Hesse
163-165
Approaching institutional context: Systemic versus dialogic research in CSCL
Hans Christian Arnseth & Sten Ludvigsen (Norway)
167-185
Collaborative knowledge building using the Design Principles Database
Yael Kali (Israel)
187-201
Co-reflection in online learning: Collaborative critical thinking as narrative
Joyce Yukawa (US)
203-228
Knowledge-building activity structures in Japanese elementary science pedagogy
Jun Oshima, Ritsuko Oshima, Isao Murayama, Shigenori Inagaki, Makiko Takenaka, Tomakazu Yamamoto, Etsuji Yamaguchi & Hayashi Nakayama (Japan)
229-246
Supporting synchronous collaborative learning: A generic multi-dimensional model
Jacques Lonchamp (France)
247-276
Errata
Students assessing their own collaborative knowledge building
Eddy Y. C. Lee (China), Carol K. K. Chan (China), & Jan van Aalst (Canada)
227-307
* * *
Volume 1, Number 3, September 2006
Focusing on participation in group meaning making
Gerry Stahl & Friedrich Hesse
311-313
Technology affordances for intersubjective meaning making: A research agenda for CSCL
Daniel D. Suthers (US)
315-337
The affordance of anchored discussion for the collaborative processing of academic texts
Jakko van der Pol, W. Admiraal & P. R. J. Simons (Netherlands)
339-357
Code talk: Student discourse and participation with networked handhelds
Tobin White (US)
359-382
Studying participation networks in collaboration using mixed methods
Alejandra Martínez, Jose Marcos, Yannis Dimitriadis, Eduardo Gomez-Sanchez, Bartolome Rubia-Avi, Ivan Jorrin-Abellan & Jose A. Marcos (Spain)
383-408
* * *
Volume 1, Number 4, December 2006
Social practices of computer-supported collaborative learning
Gerry Stahl & Friedrich Hesse
409-412
From dialogue to monologue and back: Middle spaces in computer-mediated learning
Noel Enyedy & Christopher M. Hoadley (US)
413-439
Knowledge building in mathematics: Supporting collaborative learning in pattern problems
Joan Moss & Ruth Anne Beatty (US)
441-465
Electronic (re)constitution of groups: Group dynamics from face-to-face to an online setting
Lynn Clouder, Jayne Dalley, Julian Hargreaves, Sally Parkes, Julie Sellars & Jane Toms (UK)
467-480
Consistent practices in artifact-mediated collaboration
Nathan Dwyer & Daniel D. Suthers (US)
481-511
* * *
Volume 2, Number 1, March 2007
Welcome to the future: ijCSCL volume 2
Gerry Stahl & Friedrich Hesse
1-8
Community-based learning: The core competency of residential, research-based universities
Gerhard Fischer (US), Markus Rohde & Volker Wulf (Germany)
9-40
Patterns as a paradigm for theory in community-based learning
John M.Carroll & Umer Farooq (US)
41-62
A rating scheme for assessing the quality of computer-supported collaboration processes
Anne Meier, Hans Spada & Nikol Rummel (Germany)
63-86
Investigating patterns of interaction in networked learning and computer-supported collaborative learning: A role for social network analysis
Maarten De Laat & Victor Lally, Lasse Lipponen & Robert-Jan Simons (Netherlands & Finland)
87-103
Barriers to online critical discourse
Liam Rourke & Heather Kanuka (Singapore)
105-126
* * *
Volume 2, Number 2 & 3, September 2007
A double issue for CSCL 2007
Gerry Stahl, Daniel D. Suthers & Friedrich Hesse
127-131
Contextual perspective in analyzing collaborative knowledge construction of two small groups in web-based discussion
Maarit Arvaja (Finland)
133-158
Supporting collaborative learning and problem solving in a constraint-based CSCL environment for UML class diagrams
Nilufar Baghaei, Antonija Mitrovic & Warwick Irwin (New Zealand)
159-190
Dealing with multiple documents on the WWW: The role of meta-cognition in the formation of documents models
Marc Stadtler & Rainer Bromme (Germany)
191-210
Specifying computer-supported collaboration scripts
Lars Kobbe, Armin Weinberger, Pierre Dillenbourg, Andreas Harrer, Raija Hämäläinen, Päivi Häkkinen, & Frank Fischer (Germany, Switzerland, Finland)
211-224
Scripting by assigning roles: Does it improve knowledge construction in asynchronous discussion groups?
Tammy Schellens, Hilde Van Keer, Bram De Wever & Martin Valcke (Belgium)
225-246
Using graphical tools in a phased activity for enhancing dialogical skills: An example with Digalo
Nathalie Muller Mirza, Valérie Tartas, Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont & Jean-François De Pietro (Switzerland, France)
247-272
How do argumentation diagrams compare when student pairs use them as a means for debate or as a tool for representing debate?
Kristine Lund, Gaëlle Molinari, Arnauld Séjourné & Michael Baker (France, Switzerland)
273-295
Argumentation in a changing world
Baruch B. Schwarz & Reuma De Groot (Israel)
297-313
Rainbow: A framework for analyzing computer-mediated pedagogical debates
Michael Baker, Jerry Andriessen, Kristine Lund, Marie van Amelsvoort & Matthieu Quignard (France, Netherlands)
315-357
* * *
Volume 2, Number 4, December 2007
CSCL and its flash themes
Gerry Stahl
359-362
Using activity-oriented design methods to study collaborative knowledge building in e-learning courses within higher education
Christine Greenhow & Brad Belbas (US)
363-391
Future Technology Workshop: A collaborative method for the design of new learning technologies and activities
Giasemi N. Vavoula & Mike Sharples (UK)
393-419
Facilitating argumentative knowledge construction with computer-supported collaboration scripts
Karsten Stegmann, Armin Weinberger & Frank Fischer (Germany)
421-447
The role of floor control and of ontology in argumentative activities with discussion-based tools
Baruch B. Schwarz & Amnon Glassner (Israel)
449-478
Putting the pieces together: Online Argumentation Vee Diagrams enhance thinking during discussion
E. Michael Nussbaum, Denise L. Winsor, Yvette M. Aqui & Anne M. Poliquin (US)
479-500
* * *
Volume 3, Number 1, March 2008
The many levels of CSCL
Gerry Stahl & Friedrich Hesse
1-4
The mechanics of CSCL macro scripts
Pierre Dillenbourg & Fabrice Hong (Switzerland)
5-23
What does it mean? Students' procedural and conceptual problem solving in a CSCL environment designed within the field of science education
Ingeborg Krange & Sten Ludvigsen (Norway)
25-51
A community of practice among tutors enabling student participation in a seminar preparation
Bernhard Nett (Germany)
53-67
The need for considering multilevel analysis in CSCL research—An appeal for the use of more advanced statistical methods
Ulrike Cress (Germany)
69-84
Group awareness and self-presentation in computer-supported information exchange
Joachim Kimmerle & Ulrike Cress (Germany)
85-97
* * *
Volume 3, Number 2, June 2008
The strength of the lone wolf
Gerry Stahl
99-103
A systemic and cognitive view on collaborative knowledge building with wikis
Ulrike Cress & Joachim Kimmerle (Germany)
105-122
Supporting controversial CSCL discussion with augmented group awareness tools
Jürgen Buder & Daniel Bodemer (Germany)
123-139
Annotations and the collaborative digital library: Effects of an aligned annotation interface on student argumentation and reading strategies
Joanna Wolfe (US)
141-164
Appropriation of a shared workspace: Organizing principles and their application
Maarten Overdijk & Wouter van Diggelen (Netherlands)
165-192
Operationalizing macro-scripts in CSCL technological settings
Pierre Tchounikine (France)
193-233
* * *
Volume 3, Number 3, September 2008
Explorations of participation in discourse
Gerry Stahl * Friedrich Hesse
235-236
Analyzing collaborative learning processes automatically: Exploiting the advances of computational linguistics in CSCL
Carolyn Rosé * Yi-Chia Wang * Yue Cui * Jaime Arguello * Karsten Stegmann * Armin Weinberger * Frank Fischer (US, Germany)
237-271
Context-oriented communication and the design of computer-supported discursive learning
Thomas Herrmann * Andrea Kienle (Germany)
273-299
Cultural practices in networked classroom learning environments
Nancy Ares (US)
301-326
The effect of a script and a structured interface in grounding discussions
Judith Schoonenboom (Netherlands)
327-341
Supporting students' participation in authentic proof activities in CSCL environments
Diler Oner (Turkey)
343-359
Book review: Exploring thinking as communicating in CSCL
Gerry Stahl (US)
361-368
* * *
Volume 3, Number 4, December 2008
CSCL practices
Gerry Stahl * Friedrich Hesse
369-372
Leveraging online communities in fostering adaptive schools
David Hung * Kenneth Y. T. Lim * Der-Thanq Victor Chen * Thiam Seng Koh (Singapore)
373-386
The right tool for the wrong task? Match and mismatch between first and second stimulus in double stimulation
Andreas Lund * Ingvill Rasmussen (Norway)
387-412
Exploring embedded guidance and self-efficacy in educational multi-user virtual environments
Brian C. Nelson * Diane Jass Ketelhut (US)
413-427
Alternative goal structures for computer game-based learning
Fengfeng Ke (US)
429-445
Automatic coding of dialog acts in collaboration protocols
Gijsbert Erkens * Jeroen Janssen (Netherlands)
447-470
* * *
Volume 4, Number 1, March 2009
Yes we can!
Gerry Stahl
1-4
The pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies
Diana Laurillard (UK)
5-20
Productive failure in CSCL groups
Manu Kapur (Singapore) * Charles Kinzer (US)
21-46
A connective ethnography of peer knowledge sharing and diffusion in a tween virtual world
Deborah Fields * Yasmin Kafai (US)
47-68
Learning to collaborate while being scripted or by observing a model
Nikol Rummel * Hans Spada * Sabine Hauser (Germany)
69-92
The power of natural frameworks: Technology and the question of agency in CSCL settings
Annika Lantz-Andersson (Sweden)
93-107
* * *
Volume 4, Number 2, June 2009
Practice perspectives in CSCL
Gerry Stahl * Friedrich Hesse
109-114
The joint organization of interaction within a multimodal CSCL medium
Murat Cakir * Alan Zemel * Gerry Stahl (US)
115-149
Affordances revisited: Articulating a Merleau-Pontian view
Nina Bonderup Dohn (Denmark)
151-170
Genre and CSCL: The form and rhetoric of the online posting
Norm Friesen (US)
171-185
Exploring metaskills of knowledge-creating inquiry in higher education
Hanni Muukkonen * Minna Lakkala (Finland)
187-211
Knowledge-practice perspective on technology-mediated learning
Kai Hakkarainen (Finland)
213-231
* * *
Volume 4, Number 3, September 2009
Classical dialogs in CSCL
Gerry Stahl * Friedrich Hesse
233-237
Time is precious: Variable- and event-centred approaches to process analysis in CSCL research
Peter Reimann (Australia)
239-257
Distinguishing knowledge sharing, knowledge construction, and knowledge creation discourses
Jan van Aalst (China)
259-287
A three-level analysis of collaborative learning in dual interaction spaces
Jacques Lonchamp (France)
289-317
Collaborative corrections with spelling control: Digital resources and peer assistance
Asta Cekaite (Sweden)
319-341
Web 2.0: Inherent tensions and evident challenges for education
Nina Bonderup Dohn (Denmark)
343-363
* * *
Volume 4, Number 4, December 2009
Paradigms of shared knowledge
Gerry Stahl * Friedrich Hesse
365-369
Wikis to support the "collaborative" part of collaborative learning
Johann A. Larusson * Richard Alterman (US)
371-402
Earth science learning in SMALLab: A design experiment for mixed reality
David Birchfield * Colleen Megowan-Romanowicz (US)
403-421
Contrasting the use of tools for presentation and critique: Some cases from architectural education
Gustav Lymer * Jonas Ivarsson * Oskar Lindwall (Sweden)
423-444
An ontology engineering approach to the realization of theory-driven group formation
Seiji Isotani * Akiko Inaba * Mitsuru Ikeda * Riichiro Mizoguchi (Japan)
445-478
* * *
Volume 5, Number 1, March 2010
The CSCL field matures
Gerry Stahl * Friedrich Hesse
1-3
A framework for conceptualizing, representing and analyzing distributed interaction
Daniel D. Suthers * Nathan Dwyer * Richard Medina * Ravi Vatrapu (US, Denmark)
5-42
Computer-supported argumentation: A review of the state-of-the-art
Oliver Scheuer * Frank Loll * Niels Pinkwart * Bruce M. McLaren (Germany, US)
43-102
Exploring whether students' use of labeling depends upon the type of online activity
Eva Bures * Philip C. Abrami * Richard F. Schmid (Canada)
103-116
Towards a dialectic relation between the results in CSCL: Three critical methodological aspects of content analysis schemes
Marc Clara * Teresa Mauri (Spain)
117-136
* * *
Volume 5, Number 2, June 2010
A prism of CSCL research
Gerry Stahl * Friedrich Hesse
137-139
Mr. Vetro: A collective simulation for teaching health science
Andri Ioannidou * Alexander Repenning * David Webb * Diane Keyser * Lisa Luhn * Christof Daetwyler (US)
141-166
Animation and grammar in science education: Learners’ construal of animated educational software
Göran Karlsson (Sweden)
167-189
Scripting a distance-learning university course: Do students benefit from net-based scripted collaboration?
Jörg M. Haake * Hans-Rüdiger Pfister (Germany)
191-210
Distributed leadership in CSCL groups
Julia Gressick * Sharon J. Derry (US)
211-236
Promoting metacognitive skills through peer scaffolding in a CSCL environment
Manoli Pifarre * Ruth Cobos (Spain)
237-253
* * *
Volume 5, Number 3, September 2010
Guiding group cognition in CSCL
Gerry Stahl
255-258
Online moderation of synchronous e-argumentation
Christa S. C. Asterhan * Baruch B. Schwarz (US, Israel)
259-282
Scaffolding problem-based learning with CSCL tools
Jingyan Lu * Susanne P. Lajoie * Jeffrey Wiseman (Hong Kong, Canada)
283-298
How digital concept maps of collaborators’ knowledge influence collaborative problem solving
Tanja Engelmann * Friedrich W. Hesse (Germany)
299-319
A Copernican turn for the development of flexibly reusable collaboration scripts
Christof Wecker * Karsten Stegmann * Florian Bernstein * Michael J. Huber * Georg Kalus * Ingo Kollar * Sabine Rathmayer * Frank Fischer (Germany)
321-343
Revealing preconditions for trustful collaboration in CSCL
Anne Gerdes (Denmark)
345-353
* * *
Volume 5, Number 4, December 2010
Beyond folk theories of CSCL
Gerry Stahl * Friedrich Hesse
354-
Can the interactive whiteboard support young children’s collaborative communication and thinking in classroom science activities?
Ruth Kershner * Neil Mercer * Paul Warwick * Judith Kleine Staarman (UK)
Sharing and cultivating tacit knowledge in an online learning environment
Meng Yew Tee * Dennis Karney (Malaysia, US)
Using activity theory to understand intergenerational play: The case of Family Quest
Sinem Siyahhan * Sasha A. Barab * Michael Downton (US)
The collaborative construction of chronotopes during computer-supported collaborative professional tasks
Maria Beatrice Ligorio * Giuseppe Ritella (Italy)
1(1): ijCSCL – a journal for research in CSCL
A journal of the community
The launch of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (ijCSCL) is a propitious step forward for the CSCL community: It heralds a transition of the field to a new level of academic maturity. It provides an appropriate communication medium and a selective knowledge archive for an increasingly global research network.
ijCSCL was proposed by the CSCL community and is sponsored by the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). The Board of Editors includes many leading CSCL researchers from around the world, and others participate as reviewers. Many of the articles in ijCSCL originate in papers at CSCL conferences and regional workshops.
This journal is committed to serving as an important communication vehicle of the growing CSCL community and cognate fields. As such, ijCSCL will contribute to our collaborative learning as a knowledge-building community of practice.
The first ten years of CSCL
The term computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) was first publicly coined at an international workshop in Maratea, Italy, in 1989. Since 1995, a biannual series of international CSCL conferences has been held in North America, Western Europe and most recently Asia. The 2005 CSCL conference held in Taiwan celebrated the tenth anniversary of the conference series with the theme, “CSCL: The Next Ten Years.” Most of the articles in this issue of ijCSCL are based on conference papers from there.
As the CSCL conference series evolved over the past ten years, an international community of researchers formed around it. Participants had professional roots in diverse fields, such as artificial intelligence, educational and cognitive psychology, software development, instructional design. While the conference proceedings served as boundary objects to tie this interdisciplinary community loosely together, more was felt to be needed. In recent years, a CSCL book series was launched through Springer and already offers five edited volumes. ijCSCL was proposed as an additional medium to support this fast-growing discipline.
Meanwhile, ISLS was founded to provide an institutional support for CSCL and other learning science conferences and journals. Along with the Journal of the Learning Sciences, ijCSCL is an official journal of ISLS. Another important factor in the development of the CSCL community has been the establishment of regional networks of CSCL researchers and local centers; the oldest of these is the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Canada and the largest is the CSCL SIG of Kaleidoscope in Europe. Such collaborative networks have been essential to progress in this field, and stand in the background of much of the work presented in this issue.
The next ten years of CSCL
Establishing this journal, like holding the latest conference in Taiwan, reflects a strategy that aims to make the CSCL community fully international. We live in a global world and we learn together. The issues that confront the field of CSCL today are far too complex to be solved by individuals or small labs working independently. We must pool our resources, our insights and our findings. The journal’s mission is to share seminal innovations and proposals from around the world, so they can be taken up and collaboratively developed. This issue features contributions from Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Over the next decade, ijCSCL will contribute to the development of the CSCL field by providing a peer-reviewed venue for the exchange of high-quality analyses and ideas. Although it is now well established as an academic specialty and as a leading-edge research domain, like all vigorous research fields CSCL faces many challenges in specifying its subject matter and approaches. The journal will help to define and project the field’s identity.
As a heritage of its interdisciplinary origins, CSCL research includes a mixture of theories, technologies and methodologies. Most of these were developed in different academic contexts and are tuned to conflicting sets of criteria. While it may have been feasible to make progress on CSCL problems during the first decade of the field’s existence from exclusively within an educational psychology perspective or using an artificial intelligence approach, it is less likely now. We have learned meanwhile that the issues are complex and intertwined. One must address system-building, instructional-design, experimental-analysis and other aspects simultaneously. The guiding theories, technologies, methodologies, curricula and classroom practices must co-evolve in orchestrated efforts.
This not only means that CSCL research must be practiced by collaborative research teams with diverse training, but also that we need to develop theory, technology, research methods and educational practices that are specific to CSCL, and not simply inherited. We need theories of collaborative interaction that are not necessarily based on individual learning models. We need technologies with specific supports for collaborative learning, not just generic communication media. We need methodologies that capture both micro-level interactions in small groups and community-level developments as mediated by social practices and by technical infrastructures. The articles in this issue start to move in such directions.
A journal of the future
The technology of knowledge dissemination is changing rapidly. An international journal of CSCL should be at the forefront of such change. Today, more academic research is conducted by Internet searches than by browsing a library’s back-room stacks. Research not readily available online is doomed to obscurity. Without losing sight of the importance of archival preservation, Open Access must be a priority. Through a unique arrangement with the prestigious academic press Springer, ijCSCL is able to make the full text of its articles freely available on the Web, indefinitely, while still publishing them electronically and in traditional hardcopy journal form.
All articles published in ijCSCL are subject to a rigorous peer review process, typically going through several rounds of revision at the direction of at least three Board members in order to bring out their most important contributions. Once a paper is officially accepted it is typeset, assigned a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and posted on ijCSCL.org where it is permanently available for free. Subsequently, the final and official version is published on SpringerLink.com. Quarterly issues of the journal are printed and mailed to subscribers.
Springer is a leader in the field of academic publishing. They bring to this endeavor a wealth of experience and prestige, and they will continue to do so as the publishing industry evolves. Working together, ijCSCL, ISLS and Springer have developed a number of ways to make the journal accessible to the widest possible audience. ijCSCL is already included in Springer’s catalog of education journals, which is distributed to thousands of universities worldwide. Additionally, members of ISLS receive free electronic access and can choose to subscribe to ijCSCL as part of their membership fee at ISLS.org. Springer has an alert service at www.springerlink.com/alerting and various free access offers to selected electronic articles. These broad access efforts ensure that ijCSCL will be indexed and ranked highly by ISI and other relevant abstracting and indexing services.
Introducing the inaugural issue
In keeping with the Taiwan conference theme, “CSCL: The Next Ten Years,” volume 1, issue 1 of ijCSCL includes articles that propose new directions for the CSCL field. Topics range from reflections on the evolution of the CSCL community itself to innovative theoretical perspectives, pedagogical practices, research methodologies and technological developments.
These articles illustrate the variety of methods, theories and approaches active in contemporary CSCL work. They draw on research traditions, theoretical frameworks, quantitative measures, qualitative analyses, case studies and iterative trials to support their claims and proposals. In future issues, the scope will be broadened further by including more empirical studies based on classic experimental methodology. Rigorous scientific analyses from any approach that contribute to progress in CSCL are welcome. This issue features the following:
1. The CSCL community in its first decade
The journal opens with an analysis of the history and development of the CSCL research community. First, a variety of quantitative measures are applied to test prevailing notions about the nature and composition of the community. A key question has to do with continuity of membership: to what extent do attendees at one conference increase their level of participation in subsequent conferences and what is the effect of the high turnover of newcomers? Is the conference series really international; what factors influence its geographic mix? While certain trends emerge from the data, it is necessary to also incorporate qualitative analyses to gain a better understanding of the significance of these trends. The study provides an initial scientific look at CSCL as a research community and establishes a baseline for further investigation, but it also raises enduring methodological questions about how to assess such a fluid and multi-faceted community. It is suggestive of how to continue to deepen the international character of the community.
2. A relational, indirect, meso-level approach
Much CSCL research focuses on the individual learner or on local interactions in dyads and small groups. The role of technology is conceptualized as mediation by affordances of artifacts, which exist within socio-cultural contexts, influenced by relatively stable large-scale factors. This paper confronts these current views with theoretical challenges emerging from two European Union projects. It suggests that technologies like the Internet cannot be treated as simple artifacts, but form infrastructures at a meso level that mediate between people and social structures. Infrastructures are not objects with attributes, but are enacted in use in ways that help to evolve social edifices. Their relational character implies that design of CSCL technologies and interventions can only be indirect, establishing preconditions for educational opportunities, but not causally determining learning outcomes. This result has not only methodological implications, but ethical ones as well.
3. Student assessment of collaborative inquiry
Perhaps the most vexing issue today in transforming instruction into collaborative knowledge building is how to assess student benefits. If learning takes place through the group, classroom or community, then how can outcomes be measured or credit assigned? In a clever twist, this research has students in Hong Kong schools analyze and assess the knowledge building that takes place in their own classrooms, with a certain emphasis on their own individual involvement. Assessment thereby merges with meta-cognition and promotes deeper learning for both group and individual. This research earned the best paper award at the Taiwan conference; it is part of a long-term research agenda related to the work of Scardamalia and Bereiter, who were there given the lifetime achievement award for their seminal contributions to CSCL. The paper uses quantitative quasi-experimental statistical results to support its claims, as well as qualitative analysis and case study examples to convey a more detailed understanding of these results.
4. A scholarship of application
The conventional assumption is that scientific research must result in a generalizable discovery of new knowledge. However, in a new and interdisciplinary scientific community it is also important to integrate existing knowledge from other fields, with appropriate adaptation. This paper proposes yet another form of valuable work in the learning sciences: Exploring how a technology can be applied in a spectrum of situations. The applicability of specific technologies to the support of collaborative learning is not a binary question. Interestingly, this paper demonstrates both the potential and the limitations of wiki technology for CSCL. Within the same university with the same tech support, the use of wikis succeeded easily in certain subject matters and classroom cultures but failed in others. The authors explore in detail the reasons for this and the potential for overcoming the barriers in certain cases.
5. Evolving a chat tool to increase understanding
Instant messaging, SMS and chat are widely popular among students for socializing one-on-one. In principle, chat technology has the potential to support many-to-many communication for collaborative learning activities, overcoming the requirements of face-to-face interaction for turn-taking and physical presence. However, active chat sessions involving more than three or four participants become confusing and straining. The design-based research reported here undertook many iterations of re-design to respond to the problem of chat confusion. Each attempt led to new insights into the problem and ideas for technical responses. The research agenda spanning several years follows a systematic path of iterative inquiry and CSCL technology design evolution, tested in a Brazilian classroom setting. Thereby, the chat tool is successively modified to overcome the major barriers of this medium and to free chat to become an important technology for collaborative learning.
6. A dialogical understanding of teaching thinking skills
It is now popularly accepted that success in the contemporary world requires creative, sophisticated thinking skills, and not just the mastery of accepted facts and proven rules. Theoretical analysis of the nature of higher-order thinking skills ties them fundamentally to dialogic understanding as described in this final article. Thereby, it argues for the centrality of collaborative learning. A series of case studies illustrates the point that many core thinking skills of individuals are actually derived from dialogic skills of small groups of people interacting and collaborating. The skills include dealing effectively with multiple, potentially incompatible perspectives and complex problems that have no clear solution paths or final answers. The notion of teaching thinking skills rather than facts is re-conceptualized in terms of a dialogic model, bringing theoretic coherence to an important but hitherto ad hoc area of study. Perhaps these are the kinds of thinking skills needed in CSCL research itself, developed at the niveau of scientific methodology.
1(2): Building knowledge in the classroom, building knowledge in the CSCL community
If most people who read this journal were asked by a non-academic—say at a social event or by a relative—about their work and what they are striving to accomplish, they might respond that they are trying to help kids learn better. The image that they might evoke is one of students in a school classroom, on a field trip or in an online community working together with the aid of computer-based tools. The CSCL approach recommends collaborative learning arrangements and points to the potential of a broad variety of digital media and artifacts to enhance the group knowledge building. The articles in this journal showcase new ideas about designing, fielding and evaluating such pedagogical and technological interventions in classroom learning. This issue develops a variety of perspectives on knowledge building in the classroom, as you will see as you read each article.
In addition, ijCSCL addresses the concerns of the academic field. By providing a quarterly forum for innovative research, it promulgates the leading edge of grounded thinking and healthy controversy. By printing extended versions of exceptional conference papers and introducing other mature studies, it partakes of the life of the community. To promote the use of these articles in digital settings, the official electronic versions with CrossRef (an online reference-linking system) are posted upon acceptance for subscribers (including thousands of universities worldwide) at: www.springeronline.com/journal/11412. To provide open access, pre-publication versions of the articles are freely available at: http://ijcscl.org/?go=contents.
The hardcopy version of the first issue of ijCSCL appeared at AERA ’06, the large gathering of the American Educational Research Association. This second issue will appear during ICLS ’06; all registered attendees there will be eligible for a free subscription to ijCSCL by requesting it from ISLS. Others can sign up at http://isls.org/membership.html. ISLS membership fees for 2007 will be fully deducted from registration for CSCL ’07, to be held in the New York City area—see http://isls.org/cscl. Note that papers for CSCL ’07 are due by November 1; some of them will eventually be published in ijCSCL.
ijCSCL has already been added to the ICO-journal list in the Netherlands, thanks to our Dutch colleagues. This allows ijCSCL publications to count for tenure and promotion there. This is a first step in ijCSCL’s eventual inclusion in other abstracting and indexing services.
A few future issues of ijCSCL will be special issues, and focus on specific themes of importance to the CSCL community. These topics have grown out of collaborative efforts by researchers in multinational projects or international conference workshops. Current proposals for special issues or themes include:
Collaborative learning in mobile and ubiquitous environments
Dynamic automated support for CSCL
Networked learning
Paradigms for learning in communities
Scripting in CSCL
Methods for evaluating CSCL
Graphical support for CSCL
If you would like to contribute a paper on one of these themes, please send a brief note to info@ijCSCL.org.
The unity and diversity of the second issue
The second issue of ijCSCL continues to offer practical ideas for promoting collaborative learning with computer support, and related pedagogical approaches for use in the classroom. Simultaneously, it expresses a strong self-reflective tendency, proposing visions of desired futures for the field of CSCL research and arguing for innovative ways to advance the science. The mix of articles reflects a growing recognition that considerations of pedagogy, content, technology design, social context and theory must develop together, through mutual influence. The old distinctions between disparate disciplines and competing methodologies must be overcome in favor of professional collaboration and mixed methods.
The articles in this issue represent very different approaches to specialized concerns. They come, once more, from around the world: Norway, Israel, the US, Japan and France. Yet, in part by virtue of coming together in this journal, they partake of a unity—the unity of the CSCL research effort itself.
1. Institutional Context The first article in this issue explicitly raises the question of the role of the classroom context in contributing to the knowledge building that takes place in schools. Arnseth & Ludvigsen approach this issue from within the situation of theorizing in the CSCL community, which they construe as a tension between systemic and dialogic paradigms. They work back and forth between the concrete phenomena and the meta-theoretical, uncovering the oft-ignored immediate social context of collaboration by bringing the two major theoretical orientations of the CSCL field into dialog with each other. From a systemic vantage point, CSCL approaches and tools have met with both substantial success and discouraging lack of effect in different kinds of classrooms. Close analysis of dialogic interactions reveals the crucial role of how classroom social and pedagogical norms are put into practice by students as they make sense of their work together and thereby determine how contextual variables are realized.
2. Building Knowledge about Design Principles Kali proposes a digital tool for the CSCL community itself, designed to enhance knowledge building in the classroom by building knowledge in the discipline. She follows cycles of design-based research to demonstrate how a database of pedagogical principles, best practices or design patterns can be used to improve classroom learning and how the database itself can evolve in the process. The Design Principles Database is available for the CSCL community to use and extend. Interestingly, the example of principled classroom practice presented here as a case study involves peer-evaluation, an approach discussed in depth by Lee, Chan & van Aalst last issue and reprinted within this one.
3. Co-reflection and Narrative Analysis The power of detailed analysis is illustrated in the paper by Yukawa. Using narrative analysis, she gets at the nature of collaboration between two adult students and their teacher, who communicated online via off-the-shelf technologies. The article presents the concept of co-reflection, showing both its tacit and explicit forms, as well as its cognitive and affective facets. This analysis of co-reflection locates individual reflection, made visible in shared narrative, as a part of group cognition. Conversely, it brings to the fore characteristics of the group interaction that have previously gone unnoted, emphasizing, for instance, the roles of metaphor and interpersonal relationship.
4. Knowledge-building Activity Structures The problem of building knowledge in a traditional K-12 classroom is addressed face-on in the Japanese context by the efforts reported here. Oshima, et al. describe how the use of the Knowledge Forum technology and associated principles of knowledge building were merged with established activity structures of elementary science classrooms in Japan. Two cycles of a design study are analyzed. The first year resulted in a discouraging lack of knowledge building, but after both the task and participation designs were refined in the second year, the results were much more encouraging. The tension for students between the drive to complete tasks and the goal of building community knowledge remains as an inertial brake on educational change.
5. A Generic Framework for Chat Last issue’s investigation of techniques for overcoming problems of the chat medium by Fuks, et al. suggested the need to carefully design synchronous media for collaborative learning. Now, Lonchamp provides a framework for systematically considering alternative features to include in synchronous support under different conditions. The framework is designed to model systems that are flexible and can be tailored to a wide range of users, communities, goals and contexts. Although this work is preliminary, it is published in the hopes of sparking collaboration within the CSCL community in the design, development, evaluation and theory of chat support for knowledge building using ideas and open source technologies offered here.
Errata An unfortunate series of circumstances while publishing the first issue resulted in typographical errors in the article by Lee, Chan & van Aalst. To correct this, we republish both the print and electronic versions of this article in their entirety.
1(3): Focusing on participation in group meaning making
Welcome new subscribers
Many researchers participated in the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2006) in Bloomington, Indiana in June, joining ISLS and signing up to receive ijCSCL. Some of the papers from that conference may be submitted for publication in future issues of the journal.
The CSCL SIG of Kaleidoscope—a network of over three hundred researchers and doctoral students in Europe—is now joining ISLS through a special trial membership. Each member will receive an issue of ijCSCL in the mail and have electronic access during 2006. We hope they will become permanent subscribers.
Kaleidoscope will be holding an innovative regional CSCL workshop in January: an Alpine Rendezvous (http://craftsrv1.epfl.ch/events/alpine). Other regional conferences related to CSCL are CRIWG (http://www.criwg.org/) in Valladolid, Spain this September, and ICCE http://www.icce-2006.org/) in Beijing, China, in November.
It is already time to start preparing for the next international CSCL conference: CSCL 2007 will be held outside of New York City at Rutgers University in July. The deadline for paper submissions is November 1, 2006. The next ICLS conference will be in Utrecht, near Amsterdam, in the summer of 2008. ISLS members will receive savings on registration at these conferences. For non-ISLS members, the conference fees will also cover the cost of a full ISLS membership, including the option to subscribe to ijCSCL. So put these conferences on your schedule. If you would like to propose a site for a future ISLS conference, look for instructions at http://isls.org in the fall.
The CSCL Community of ISLS held elections recently. The new Executive Committee was announced at ICLS: Pierre Dillenbourg, Cindy Hmelo-Silver, Chris Hoadley, Paul Kirschner, Tim Koschmann, Naomi Miyake, Claire O’Malley, Roy Pea, Hans Spada, Gerry Stahl, Dan Suthers, and Barbara Wasson. The new members are all on the ijCSCL Editorial Board.
Please send news of interest to CSCL researchers to http://info@ijCSCL.org.
A proposal for a CSCL research agenda
This issue starts with a call for a theoretical focus that can bring together the many research strands within current CSCL research, directing them each in their own way to investigate the phenomena of intersubjective meaning making as the most appropriate object of analysis for CSCL as a unique and important science. It suggests that “intersubjective meaning making” is a more productive term than “collaborative learning,” which is only visible indirectly and retroactively. Such a focus has implications both for the design of technology support and for the synthesis of multiple methodologies. The other articles can, coincidentally, be read as examples of taking this tack, each revealing subtle complexities that arise in practice.
Anchored discussion
The second contribution looks at how anchoring can aid technologies for intersubjective meaning making. Building on previous explorations of anchored discussion, this article provides quantitative evidence for the advantages and disadvantages of situating online postings about a document in the presence of that document, as compared to a generic discussion forum in which postings cannot directly reference locations within the discussed object. Issues of grounding and situating discourse are often investigated by looking closely at detailed cases; here quantitative measures can confirm hypotheses arising from such cases across a larger corpus of online textual interaction. By looking at how meaning is variously constructed in the different media, the authors refine our understanding of the pedagogical pros and cons of anchored discussion, which came from specific cases and participant impressions.
A handheld network
The third article shows that the technology of networked handhelds, the pedagogy of rich math settings and the scaffolding of collaboration roles can support intersubjective meaning making in small groups, but that the detailed results are hard to predict. A carefully crafted experiment in a real classroom included pre- and post-test measurements as well as qualitative and quantitative analysis of the student discourse. However, close attention to specific utterances showed that the students constructed their own ways of interacting and learning, often in opposition to the structures, hypotheses and measurements of the experiment. Learning can take place even by students whose participation in group meaning making is not very visible and, conversely, visible utterances can be used by students to avoid contributing to the group knowledge construction.
Participation networks
Social network analysis (SNA) has for several years appealed to many CSCL researchers as a way of quantifying the levels of participation of students in learning communities. It is even exciting to think of feeding such measures back to the students to increase their awareness and motivate their further participation.
However, SNA has often proven to be more work than it is worth for its shallow findings. This paper, however, enriches the depth of the analysis by carefully combining SNA with other quantitative and qualitative methods. It then investigates the use of this hybrid methodology in three strategically structured case studies, conducted at the University of Valladolid and the Open University of Catalonia in Spain. It thereby uncovers both the power and the limits of this particular approach to focusing multiple methods on group participation processes.
1(4): Social practices of computer-supported collaborative learning
CSCL and the study of social practices
Ever since Lave & Wenger’s paradigm-shaking book on Situated Learning (1991), discussions about how people learn have included considerations of how participation in communities-of-practice and in related social institutions evolves. Concepts about learning have to take more seriously into account the identity and behavior of the learners within their sociocultural settings. Unfortunately the theory of situated learning is too often construed as a questionable assumption of communities-of-practice everywhere, or as an antiquated romanticizing of apprenticeship. But Lave’s perspective is rooted in a serious philosophy of social praxis. To understand phenomena related to learning, one must study the ways in which people interact with one another.
The consideration of social practices seems particularly relevant to collaborative learning. Individual learning may take countless forms and can be analyzed in terms of the manifold theories of psychology and education; it is highly dependent upon mental conceptions, personal attitudes, modes of content presentation, etc. Learning that takes place in small groups, however, relies additionally upon the establishment of patterns of interaction to guide communication and to support coordination of the group.
When collaborative learning is computer-supported, the need for the group to adopt effective social practices is both more necessary and more complicated. The subtle social cues of intonation, gesture, facial expression, body language, etc. that have accompanied human social life for millennia may be missing in virtual contexts. As people struggle to interact through awkward computer interfaces, they need to adapt accustomed social practices to the deficits and affordances of the technology, the objective of their activity and the constraints of their interpersonal relationships.
The four articles in this issue can be read — among other ways — as studies of social practices in CSCL settings, although the papers were not written with this as their central concern. They illustrate that this theme can be investigated with a variety of methods, and begin to suggest the centrality of social practices to both individual and group cognition.
1. Spaces for monologic/dialogic practices
In the first issue of ijCSCL, Wegerif (2006) argued that mastery of dialogic practices formed the basis for the development of individual thinking skills. He called for CSCL software that opened spaces for dialog among students. In this issue, Enyedy and Hoadley consider how software can be designed to support both monological and dialogical learning in concert by opening interaction spaces that help students to move between individual work and group practices. By carefully studying interaction excerpts from CSCL settings, the authors conclude not only that individual contributions are essential to dialog as the interanimation of multiple perspectives, but also that individual cognition should be considered as involving social practices of interaction.
2. Inquiry practices
For some years, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has included among its recommendations and standards pedagogical approaches in which students “analyze and evaluate the mathematical thinking and strategies of others; communicating mathematical thinking coherently and clearly to peers; and make and investigate mathematical conjectures” (NCTM, 2000). Subsequent research on math education indicates that it is particularly difficult for students to explain their problem solving to others and to engage in collaborative reflection. Moss & Beatty explore whether software designed for knowledge building can help to support social practices of mathematical explanation. They adopt Knowledge Forum with young students who are experienced with using the software for collaborative inquiry learning in science, and they have the students use it with pre-algebra pattern problems. Using both coding-and-counting and discourse analysis, the authors find that the students do succeed in explaining their work to each other and comparing different solution paths. The software defines social practices for doing this, which are reinforced within an inquiry-learning classroom so that the students can exert “epistemic agency” in carrying out these practices of building knowledge themselves, without direct teacher intervention.
3. Group dynamics
Clouder and colleagues explore the dynamics of blended learning, how social practices change as groups of students move back and forth between face-to-face and distance interaction. After analyzing various phases within an action research approach, the authors stress continuity across the changes that seems to result in advantageous group dynamics. They stress the pivotal role of the tutor in orchestrating the sequence of phases and the corresponding group dynamics. In keeping with other educational research, they indicate that blended learning has advantages over both face-to-face and distance by themselves. The virtual venue helps some students to find their voice — but only on the basis of healthy constitution of the group in the face-to-face socializing. This paper suggests that the study of social practices in CSCL should include consideration of contrasts and continuities between the alternating phases of blended learning.
4. Consistent practices
The topic of intersubjective meaning making was highlighted in the previous issue of ijCSCL in relation to technological affordances (Suthers, 2006). In this issue, Dwyer & Suthers investigate the establishment of consistent social practices to support synchronous interaction without visual contact. In this way, they explore how people compensate for one of the major differences between face-to-face and distant interaction. Interestingly, they do this in a lab setting where the participants can actually talk, see each other’s hands and use ordinary household media like pencil and paper — thus isolating the difference that visual contact makes to social practices among dyads. They present pairs of college students with wicked problems to discuss using paper-based artifacts and observe the negotiation of innovative practices for textual communication, guided by an ethnomethodological approach. They thus establish a kind of baseline for computer-mediated interaction by seeing the kinds of practices formed using non-digital artifacts under conditions analogous to online environments.
A year of ijCSCL
This issue completes volume 1, a milestone for the journal. The vision of a high-quality, peer-reviewed international journal for the publication of innovative ideas and significant findings is now an established reality. The journal is readily available at www.SpringerLink.com in its official electronic format through the many universities worldwide that subscribe to Springer’s educational journals. Archival paper copies are mailed quarterly to hundreds of individual subscribers through membership at www.ISLS.org. The full text of all articles is available in open source at www.ijCSCL.org.
The journal is truly a product of the CSCL research community. The Editorial Board includes 43 leading researchers of CSCL and CSCW. In addition, at least 54 other researchers participated in the reviewing of submitted papers. The reviews have been exceptional. Almost every article printed underwent major revisions in response to three or four incisive reviews. These revisions resulted in substantial improvements to the presentation format of the papers. The reviewers — including Board members — are the backbone of the journal. If you would like to join the review board and participate in this stimulating and important process, drop a note to info (at) ijcscl.org. As of mid-October, we have received 84 submissions. Of these, we have published 19 and rejected 25. Seven are currently being revised in response to reviewer feedback and the remaining 33 are under review for volume 2. If you have empirical findings or theoretical developments that you think are important for the CSCL research community and that you feel are well-developed enough for a journal presentation, please review the Submission Procedures and the Instructions for Authors at www.ijCSCL.org and submit your paper. We welcome submissions from every part of the world, from any discipline relevant to the concerns of CSCL and using any appropriate scientific methodology or academic style.
Please do not forget to subscribe to ISLS and ijCSCL for 2007. Your membership fee will be deducted from your registration at CSCL ’07 this summer or ICLS ’08 next summer — see www.ISLS.org for details.
2(1): Welcome to the future: ijCSCL volume 2
An advance in the field of CSCL
The start of a second year of ijCSCL marks a significant step forward in the history of the CSCL research field. The journal is not just a venue for academic papers, but a medium of discourse about new directions and new understandings within an active community exhibiting diverse perspectives.
The journal has not merely persisted for a full year/volume; it has been adopted by the CSCL community as an important voice. Almost a hundred papers have been submitted to the journal from around the world, covering all aspects of CSCL theory, methodology, technology and practice. A total of two hundred researchers have volunteered to be reviewers, including the illustrious Editorial Board of 42 people. Many of the submitted papers expand on exceptional presentations from CSCL conferences, workshops and research labs. The paper that won the “European CSCL Award for Excellence in the Field of CSCL Research” at January’s CSCL SIG Rendez-Vous in the Swiss Alps (Arnseth & Ludvigsen, 2006) was published in ijCSCL.
Like a meeting or a conference, a journal can provide a place to communicate what is going on in a community. However meetings and conferences permit certain kinds of informality and direct interaction with the audience. So it is natural to concentrate on meetings and conferences when a field like CSCL is starting to develop. When a journal become part of the community’s communications, more formal ways of presenting assumptions, theories and outcomes start to take prominence. Journal articles reflect more mature research efforts, more intense peer review and more rigorous editing than conference papers.
During the first year of ijCSCL, a highly engaged Editorial Board and additional reviewers from the field did an exceptional job of carefully reading the submitted papers and providing deep and detailed constructive advice to improve the papers. Virtually all published papers went through extensive critique and revision. Although it may not be visible to most readers, all papers had clearer organization and stronger arguments as a result of the review process—even though they may have been based on conference papers or dissertations that had already benefited from a great deal of review and editing. In addition, the many papers that could not be published in ijCSCL each received several detailed reviews, helping their authors to learn from the experience and to understand what was needed for future publication. In such ways, the journal also serves as a means for mutual assistance within the community—for community-based collaborative learning.
The journal is thus both an avenue of more formal communication than conferences and a special form of interaction between authors and reviewers. This kind of anonymous interaction and critique can be more frank and detailed than at a conference. If ijCSCL serves these dual purposes of publication and feedback, then it’s first anniversary marks a real start to advancing the field..
The CSCL research community supports ijCSCL
As we start to publish our second volume of ijCSCL, the Board of Editors would like to thank all the members of the CSCL community who have supported the journal through its first year. The following researchers contributed reviews to ijCSCL to date:
Shaaron Ainsworth, Hans Christian Arnseth, Daniel Bodemer, Jürgen Buder, Murat Perit Cakir, John M. Carroll, Carol K.K. Chan, Elizabeth Charles, Cesar Alberto Collazos, Charles Crook, Lucilla Crosta, Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Nathan Dwyer, Noel Enyedy, Brian Foley, Andrea Forte, Hugo Fuks, Frode Guribye, Päivi Häkkinen, Christine Joyce Howe, James Hudson, Patrick Jermann, Richard Joiner, Christopher Jones, Regina Jucks, Yael Kali, Victor Kaptelinin, Manu Kapur, Andrea Kienle, Minna Lakkala, Victor Lally, Nancy Law, Lasse Lipponen, Jacques Lonchamp, Rose Luckin, Johan Lundin, Richard Medina, Anders Mørch, Daisy Mwanza-Simwami, Jun Oshima, Ruediger Pfister, Janet Read, Peter Reimann, Jochen Rick, Tim Roberts, Nikol Rummel, Nadira Saab, Johann Sarmiento, Wesley Shumar, Jan-Willem Strijbos, Berthel Sutter, Gustav Taxén, Ramon Prudencio Toledo, Jan van Aalst, Ravi Vatrapu, Marjaana Veermans, Jim Waters, Rupert Boudewijn Wegerif, Gordon Wells, Martin Wessner, Tobin Frye White, Joyce Yukawa, Nan Zhou.
Along with the members of the Editorial Board, these reviewers not only determined what was selected to publish in the journal and gave valuable insights to all submitting authors, they also contributed significantly to guiding the major revisions that all accepted papers passed through before being published. In this way, the community establishes the content and tone of the journal.
We look forward to thanking you in person for your support and your interest in ijCSCL at the international conference of CSCL 2007 at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, near New York City, July 16-21 (see http://www.isls.org/cscl2007).
Flash themes in CSCL
As mentioned in the introduction to issue 2, a number of workshops on topics in CSCL proposed developing special issues for ijCSCL. These were not topics solicited by the ijCSCL Editorial Board, but arose out of the work and concerns of practitioners. They are themes which “flashed” up in the field through a kind of spontaneous combustion of hot topics, stirred up by experiences in the wild. Responding to these openly and welcoming such suggestions has been a way for ijCSCL to give voice to the concerns of the field in a timely and flexible way and to stay at the leading edge of a rapidly evolving discipline.
This year, ijCSCL begins to publish papers on these flash themes. Reviews of papers on these themes are being coordinated by Associate Editors of ijCSCL (as indicated in parentheses below) in a move to broaden editorial responsibilities as the journal becomes more established. Future issues will include papers on the flash themes of:
Scripting in CSCL (reviews coordinated by Barbara Wasson)
Methods for Evaluating CSCL (Claire O’Malley)
Graphical Support for CSCL (Daniel D. Suthers)
In this issue, two papers on the theme of "Learning in Communities" are published. They arose out of a workshop by that name organized by Jack Carroll and Chris Hoadley at Penn State University (USA), August 14-17, 2006. The workshop was attended by 29 researchers, mostly from North America, and was sponsored by NSF (grant IIS-0511198). A report on the workshop itself appeared previously in the Journal of Community Informatics (Carroll & Bishop, 2005). Six other papers derived from the workshop are under review for the Journal of CSCW. The workshop at Penn State built on related workshops at ICLS 2004 and CSCL 2005, which resulted in special issues in the ACM SigGroup Bulletin (Klamma, Rohde, & Stahl, 2004) and in Behavior & Information Technology (Rohde, Wulf, & Stahl, 2006).
Computer-supported community-based learning
Lave & Wenger (1991) brought home the importance of “communities of practice” (CoPs) for learning. In this issue we have a pair of articles investigating the role of communities in learning within contemporary institutions. Together, they suggest a specific form of CSCL, where the term “collaborative” is specified as referring to collaboration that is “community-based” in the sense of CoPs providing socio-cultural contexts in which collaborative learning can take place. They illustrate community-based learning related to the university and related to what in the USA are known as non-profit organizations and elsewhere as non-governmental organizations (NGOs). By publishing these articles, we bring considerations from CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) and HCI (human-computer interaction) into the CSCL discussion.
Fischer, Rohde & Wulf elaborate the concept of CoP with distinctions that have developed in reaction to Lave & Wenger, distinguishing networks of practice and communities of interest from CoPs as variants. The community-based focus is a move within CSCL to the level of what Jones, Dirckinck-Holmfeld, & Lindström (2006) called the “macro-scale” in the first issue of ijCSCL. Here, a community is not only learning via computer-supported media, but they are also learning about how to design and use computer-supported “community-based” learning technology. In a transitional period for institutions of higher learning when online learning threatens the viability and competitiveness of brick-and-mortar universities, it is timely to ask how residential research universities can develop unique and attractive approaches to computer-supported community-based learning by involving students in real-world research in academic labs and local industry.
Carroll & Faroque propose a middle layer of theoretical constructs they call frameworks, which mediate between general patterns and individual cases. Based on long experience working with non-profit community-based organizations who struggle with computer technology, the authors want to formulate generalizations that will provide practical guidance in dealing with common problems that arise in this context. They draw on the idea of design patterns (Alexander, 1977) and the literature that has developed in computer science and CSCL based on Alexander’s approach. We may dispute the definition of pattern used here as a simplification of Alexander’s pattern languages and may wonder if this sense of theory is strong enough for our field, as a reviewer did, but the authors seem to be pointing in a promising direction. Just as the nature of residential research universities in the age of distance education is in turmoil, voluntary and neighborhood-based organizations are threatened in the age of social fragmentation and globalization. In both cases, there seems to be no general solution; pattern languages of inter-related partial solutions generalized from multiple experiences and adaptable to concrete cases may provide the best solution.
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