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Article of Volume 5, Issue 4, December 2010

The collaborative construction of chronotopes during computer-supported collaborative professional tasks

Authors: Maria Beatrice Ligorio, Giuseppe Ritella

Abstract: In this paper, we use the concept of chronotope to analyse the co-construction of spatial and temporal frameworks during collaborative interaction. A chronotope is a genre of movement or pacing in the space that participants adopt over the temporal duration of an activity. We look in particular at the conjunction point of time and space as revealing how collaboration works and what role is played by technology. Six sessions during which 10 teachers prepared a pedagogical scenario to be implemented in school were filmed and qualitatively analysed. The tempo of the activity was found to vary considerably depending on various factors, such as the features of the tools used, the aims of the activity, and the skills employed by the participants to achieve them. Three different tempos were identified, which we named, using a musical metaphor, Adagio, Andante, and Allegretto. Some representative excerpts of each of these tempos, and of the moving from one tempo to another, are selected and discussed. Our results allow an in-depth understanding of coordination within a group of teachers working on planning a common educational scenario for their classrooms with the mediation of a software tool.

Keywords: Chronotope, Heterotopia, Teachers, Video analysis, Socio-constructivism, Bakhtin, Software supporting face-to-face interaction

Citation: Ligorio, M. B. & Ritella, G. (2010) The collaborative construction of chronotopes during computer-supported collaborative professional tasks. ijcscl 5 (4), pp.

DOI: 10.1007/s11412-010-9094-4

Preprint: ligor_ritella_5_4.pdf

About this article at link.springer.com [http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11412-010-9094-4] including a link to the official electronic version.