The richness of CSCL environments
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The richness of CSCL environments Ulrike Cress 1 # The Author(s) 2020
It has been a year of transition and challenge for the journal and we are excited to bring you the fourth edition of 2020. This fourth issue of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning presents four full papers and a review of the upcoming International Handbook of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. The four papers illustrate the richness of CSCL environments: Learning can be supported by collaboration between individuals, by collaboration within groups, or by collaboration with artificial agents. Moderators of cooperation can be language, talk, gestures, or other forms of embodied actions, as well as material tools or artifacts. Prompts and scripts can provide scaffolds. Last, but not least, the surrounding environment, may it be furniture or digital tools, influence people’s interactions and behavior through their affordances. Each of the four papers featured in this issue deal with different slice through this rich tapestry. The first paper, by Jianwei Zhang, Guangji Yuan and Maria Bogouslavsky (Zhang et al. 2020), analyses knowledge building. And thus this paper draws from one of the most prominent theories in CSCL. The paper shows how knowledge building occurring within individual classes is extended through bridging into other classes through software that introduces cross-class interactions. Two grade-5/6 science classrooms, each taught by a different teacher, are interlinked in the Knowledge Forum via “super notes”. These are notes that the classes can post in a crosscommunity meta-space. The super-notes serve as boundary objects that link the knowledge building processes taking place separately in each classroom. Whereas interaction within the two classes enable a kind of horizontal integration of ideas (where students within the same class incorporate additional topics, deal with the diversity of ideas among their peers, and integrate multiple information sources), the use of super notes allows for vertical moves in which the students dig deeper into the underlying issues and problems as progress is made and to “rise above” to higher planes of thinking and conceptualization. The paper demonstrates how super notes can prompt such rise-above syntheses, and how they can serve as an “epistemic ladder” that supports deeper understanding. While regular notes in the Knowledge Forum online discourse typically focus on direct responses to the ideas posted by classmates, super notes helped to consolidate knowledge advances. Students
* Ulrike Cress u.cress@iwm–tuebingen.de
1
Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany
U. Cress
considered them mainly as a means to provide knowledge to others. Accordingly, both the teachers of both classrooms conceived the “super view” as a higher-level space of discourse where students formulated major questions and “big ideas” for cross-community sharing. Generalizing from these findings, the authors conclude that learning designs should support people in “cli
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