International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning
ijCSCL : SessionFour
HomePage :: Categories :: PageIndex :: RecentChanges :: RecentlyCommented :: Login/Register
High quality translations - from experienced native speaking translators. Whether it is a one-page personal letter or 200-page technical manual, we deliver you the same superior quality. We entrust translating your documents to the expert native speaker with a competence in your subject area. Say, you hire us to translate a legal contract from English into French, and then it will be done by a native French speaker with an extensive expertise in translating legal documents.
Translate Papers∞
Return to DiscussionTwo
On the whole research in CSCL still seems to assume either a broadly cognitivist set of assumptions or a broadly socio-cultural set of assumptions. I think that a dialogic approach offers a significantly different third way which should be tried as it could be more fruitful. Cognitivism, with its theoretical roots in rationalism, offers a much needed vision of the vertical direction of development towards ‘better thinking’ eg meta-cognition, but it conceptualises this ‘better thinking’ in a way that has been rightly criticised for valuing only the disembodied abstractions of machine thinking. Socio-cultural approaches correct for this but the implicit theory that cognition is always describable in terms of culturally situated practice removes the vertical dimension altogether. Education becomes identity change in a social landscape but it is impossible to say which identity is better than any other either on either cognitive or on moral grounds. Applying dialogic theorists like Bakhtin, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (his later work) can offer education a different vision of the vertical development of thinking without a return to the discredited abstractions of rationalism. For dialogic theory learning to think means being pulled out of oneself to take the perspective of another and of otherness in general. In being pulled out to see from another perspective one does not lose oneself but holds two perspectives in tension together and out of that tension comes insight and understanding. Thought and indeed consciousness, is seeing ‘as if’ one is another. Mind can be expanded and enriched by the augmentation offered by new other perspectives but there is also a vertical direction towards a relationship with otherness in general. Each dialogue between two or more people generates a witness position through which one can question oneself from the perspective of the outside, not only from that of the specific other one is talking to.
Applying this dialogic perspective to CSCL design shifts the focus from teaching specific content or specific skills to expanding the collective (and individual) mind through opening, widening and deepening dialogic spaces. Applying this theoretical framework retrospectively to understand good work in CSCL some guiding principles emerge, such as the value of teaching content through drawing students into fields of dialogue and the importance of combining the use of technology with face-to-face pedagogies that actively teach the skills and social ground rules required for engagement in dialogue across difference. This framework offers a new way of understanding the role of the internet in education as both a way of teaching thinking for the individual and as a way of transforming the world in the direction of an as yet unknown global democracy.
My argument is that (a) phenomena of long-term learning and development are highly relevant to CSCL since collaboration technologies have become ubiquitous and project-based pedagogy is becoming frequently employed, and that (b) we can learn a lot about how to conceptualize and analyze long-term change processes in groups from theories and methodologies developed in history and organizational science. Historians (and sociologists) have developed ways to analyze change in terms of an event ontology, with a focus on formal accounts for narrative structures. Organizational research, and sociology, has contributed to conceptualizations of processes taking place on multiple levels, with different time scales: from individual actions to organizational and societal changes.
For our discussion particularly important is that narrative accounts do not abstract away from events by "variable-lizing" over them, i.e. events are not aggregated (by coding category) into counts, or quantified by measurement operations. Correspondingly, the researcher does not look for co-variance between the values of independent and dependent variables, but "…explains outcomes as the result of the order in which the events unfold and of particular conjunctions of events and contextual conditions" (Poole et al., 2000, p. 36). The explanation takes essentially a narrative form and works with a historical logic: In order to explain any event in the scope of a study, that event will need to be related to events that took place (potentially a long time) before, not only to contextual factors. To the extent that events are brought about by human agency, they can also be explained by teleological forces, as being brought about in order to reach a certain goal or to avoid a certain state of affairs. In any case, the order in which events occur and the conjunctions between different lines of events are essential to narrative explanations.
Another important feature of a narrative explanatory account is that narratives usually employ a "plot" that adheres to a typical structure, similar to a literary genre. Looking at a process as a holistic narrative structure can account for the fact that humans use process structures (such as team routines, scripts) as a resource--we are not 'driven' by routines in the strict sense, but can decide to adopt a routine or not, and more often than not will change a routine.
As potential benefits of 'importing' concepts and methods from historical, sociological and organisational research pertaining to notions of process and change into CSCL I would identify (a) a better theoretical alignment between processes happening on multiple levels, in particular an alignment between human agency and social structures; (b) an extension of the methodological repertoire, occupying a middle ground perhaps between qualitative (e.g., ethnomethodological) and quantitative (e.g, experimental) strategies, and (c) event models may be able to serve as 'boundary objects' between qualitatively and quantitatively oriented researchers or essay writers∞, thus contributing to synergistic rather than independent or conflicting ways of engaging in knowledge building.
Return to DiscussionTwo
Translate Papers∞
Return to DiscussionTwo
Session Four: Theoretical frameworks relevant to CSCL
Opening statement by Rupert Wegerif
On the whole research in CSCL still seems to assume either a broadly cognitivist set of assumptions or a broadly socio-cultural set of assumptions. I think that a dialogic approach offers a significantly different third way which should be tried as it could be more fruitful. Cognitivism, with its theoretical roots in rationalism, offers a much needed vision of the vertical direction of development towards ‘better thinking’ eg meta-cognition, but it conceptualises this ‘better thinking’ in a way that has been rightly criticised for valuing only the disembodied abstractions of machine thinking. Socio-cultural approaches correct for this but the implicit theory that cognition is always describable in terms of culturally situated practice removes the vertical dimension altogether. Education becomes identity change in a social landscape but it is impossible to say which identity is better than any other either on either cognitive or on moral grounds. Applying dialogic theorists like Bakhtin, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (his later work) can offer education a different vision of the vertical development of thinking without a return to the discredited abstractions of rationalism. For dialogic theory learning to think means being pulled out of oneself to take the perspective of another and of otherness in general. In being pulled out to see from another perspective one does not lose oneself but holds two perspectives in tension together and out of that tension comes insight and understanding. Thought and indeed consciousness, is seeing ‘as if’ one is another. Mind can be expanded and enriched by the augmentation offered by new other perspectives but there is also a vertical direction towards a relationship with otherness in general. Each dialogue between two or more people generates a witness position through which one can question oneself from the perspective of the outside, not only from that of the specific other one is talking to.
Applying this dialogic perspective to CSCL design shifts the focus from teaching specific content or specific skills to expanding the collective (and individual) mind through opening, widening and deepening dialogic spaces. Applying this theoretical framework retrospectively to understand good work in CSCL some guiding principles emerge, such as the value of teaching content through drawing students into fields of dialogue and the importance of combining the use of technology with face-to-face pedagogies that actively teach the skills and social ground rules required for engagement in dialogue across difference. This framework offers a new way of understanding the role of the internet in education as both a way of teaching thinking for the individual and as a way of transforming the world in the direction of an as yet unknown global democracy.
Opening statement by Peter Reimann
My argument is that (a) phenomena of long-term learning and development are highly relevant to CSCL since collaboration technologies have become ubiquitous and project-based pedagogy is becoming frequently employed, and that (b) we can learn a lot about how to conceptualize and analyze long-term change processes in groups from theories and methodologies developed in history and organizational science. Historians (and sociologists) have developed ways to analyze change in terms of an event ontology, with a focus on formal accounts for narrative structures. Organizational research, and sociology, has contributed to conceptualizations of processes taking place on multiple levels, with different time scales: from individual actions to organizational and societal changes.
For our discussion particularly important is that narrative accounts do not abstract away from events by "variable-lizing" over them, i.e. events are not aggregated (by coding category) into counts, or quantified by measurement operations. Correspondingly, the researcher does not look for co-variance between the values of independent and dependent variables, but "…explains outcomes as the result of the order in which the events unfold and of particular conjunctions of events and contextual conditions" (Poole et al., 2000, p. 36). The explanation takes essentially a narrative form and works with a historical logic: In order to explain any event in the scope of a study, that event will need to be related to events that took place (potentially a long time) before, not only to contextual factors. To the extent that events are brought about by human agency, they can also be explained by teleological forces, as being brought about in order to reach a certain goal or to avoid a certain state of affairs. In any case, the order in which events occur and the conjunctions between different lines of events are essential to narrative explanations.
Another important feature of a narrative explanatory account is that narratives usually employ a "plot" that adheres to a typical structure, similar to a literary genre. Looking at a process as a holistic narrative structure can account for the fact that humans use process structures (such as team routines, scripts) as a resource--we are not 'driven' by routines in the strict sense, but can decide to adopt a routine or not, and more often than not will change a routine.
As potential benefits of 'importing' concepts and methods from historical, sociological and organisational research pertaining to notions of process and change into CSCL I would identify (a) a better theoretical alignment between processes happening on multiple levels, in particular an alignment between human agency and social structures; (b) an extension of the methodological repertoire, occupying a middle ground perhaps between qualitative (e.g., ethnomethodological) and quantitative (e.g, experimental) strategies, and (c) event models may be able to serve as 'boundary objects' between qualitatively and quantitatively oriented researchers or essay writers∞, thus contributing to synergistic rather than independent or conflicting ways of engaging in knowledge building.
Opening statement by Nancy Law
Opening statement by Sanna Jarvela
Return to DiscussionTwo
There are no comments on this page. [Add comment]