Nathaniel's Bloodline gives a graphic account of the lives of the early settlers, explorers, cattle drovers, gold miners and gamblers. Meanwhile, home at The Rocks, Sydney's first suburb, are the wives waiting for their men to come home to their large poverty-stricken families.
In the Company of Others. Mistakes Can Kill You. The Power of Bones. Bloodshed of the Mountain Man.
Tears for a Tinker. The Farm Girl's Dream. When the Pedlar Called. Tales from the Tent. The Boy at the Gate. Great Australian Droving Stories. Katie Morag Of Course! Paterson, Lawson, and Dennis. The Woman from Kerry. Scars that Run Deep. Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men. South Of The River. Cast A Cold Eye.
First, there is a process model of knowledge building showing how utterances from multiple perspectives may be negotiated to produce shared knowledge. Second, methodological considerations are raised, arguing that the most important aspects of collaboration are systematically obscured by the very approach of many leading CSCL studies.
A solution is then proposed, by integrating the conception of knowledge building and the idea of merged perspectives with the focus on artifacts from distributed cognition theory and the close interpretation of utterances from conversation analysis. This solution is applied to an empirical case of collaboration. It also shows how the group builds knowledge about meaning in the world.
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In particular, these chapters provide:. A process model of collaborative knowledge building, incorporating perspectives and negotiation. A critique of CSCL research methodologies that obscure the collaborative phenomena. A theoretical framework for empirical analysis of collaboration. Analysis of five students building knowledge about a computer simulation. Analysis of the shared meaning that they built and its relation to the design of the software artifact. Part III, Theory of Group Cognition, includes eight chapters that reflect on the discovery of group meaning in chapter 12, as further analyzed in chapter As preliminary context, previous theories of communication are reviewed to see how they can be useful, particularly in contexts of computer support.
Then a broad-reaching attempt is made to sketch an outline of a social theory of collaborative knowledge building based on the discovery of group cognition. A number of specific issues are taken up from this, including the distinction between meaning making at the group level versus interpretation at the individual level and a critique of the popular notion of common ground.
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Chapter 18 develops the alternative research methodology hinted at in chapter Chapters 19 and 20 address philosophical possibilities for group cognition, and the final chapter complements chapter 12 with an initial analysis of computer-mediated group cognition, as an indication of the kind of further empirical work needed. The individual chapters of this final part offer:.
A review of traditional theories of communication. A sketch of a theory of building collaborative knowing. An analysis of the relationship of group meaning and individual interpretation. An investigation of group meaning as common ground versus as group cognition. A methodology for making group cognition visible to researchers.
Exploration of philosophical directions for group cognition theory. A wrap-up of the book and an indication of future work. The discussions in this book are preliminary studies of a science of computer-supported collaboration that is methodologically centered on the group as the primary unit of analysis. From different angles, the individual chapters explore how meanings are constituted, shared, negotiated, preserved, learned and interpreted socially, by small groups, within communities. The ideas these essays present themselves emerged out of specific group collaborations. The studies of this book are revised forms of individual papers, undertaken during the decade between my dissertation at Colorado and my research at Drexel, published on various specific occasions.
In bringing them together, I have tried to retain the different voices and perspectives that they expressed in their original situations. They look at issues of online collaboration from different vantage points, and I wanted to retain this diversity as a sort of collaboration of me with myself—a collection of selves that I had internalized under the influences of many people, projects, texts and circumstances.
The format of the book thereby reflects the theory it espouses: Thus, the main chapters of this book are self-contained studies. They are reproduced here as historical artifacts. The surrounding apparatus—this overview, the part introductions, the chapter lead-ins and the final chapters—has been added to make explicit the gradual emergence of the theme of group cognition.
When I started to assemble the original essays, it soon became apparent that the whole collection could be significantly more than the sum of its parts, and I wanted to bring out this interplay of notions and the implications of the overall configuration. Concepts can no longer be treated as fixed, self-contained, eternal, universal and rational, for they reflect a radically historical world.
For Descartes and his successors, there was an objective physical world, knowable in terms of a series of facts expressible in clear and distinct propositions using terms defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. While individuals often seemed to act in eccentric ways, one could still hope to understand human behavior in general in rational terms. The twentieth century changed all that.
Space and time could henceforth only be measured relative to a particular observer; position and velocity of a particle were in principle indeterminate; observation affected what was observed; relatively simple mathematical systems were logically incompletable; people turned out to be poor judges of their subconscious motivations and unable to articulate their largely tacit knowledge; rationality frequently verged on rationalization; revolutions in scientific paradigms transformed what it meant in the affected science for something to be a fact, a concept or evidence; theories were no longer seen as absolute foundations, but as conceptual frameworks that evolved with the inquiry; and knowledge at least in most of the interesting cases ended up being an open-ended social process of interpretation.
Certainly, there are still empirical facts and correct answers to many classes of questions. As long as one is working within the standard system of arithmetic, computations have objective answers—by definition of the operations. Sciences provide principles and methodologies for judging the validity of propositions within their domain.
Statements of personal opinion or individual observation must proceed through processes of peer review, critique, evaluation, argumentation, negotiation, refutation, etc. These required processes may involve empirical testing, substantiation or evidence as defined in accord with standards of the field and its community.
Of course, the standards themselves may be subject to interpretation, negotiation or periodic modification. Permeating this book is the understanding of knowledge, truth and reality as products of social labor and human interpretation rather than as simply given independently of any history or context. The foundational essay of part I chapter 4 discusses how it is possible to design software for groups groupware to support the situated interpretation that is integral to working and learning.
Interpretation plays the key analytic role in the book, with the analysis of collaboration that forms the heart of part II chapter 12 presenting an interpretation of a moment of interaction. And in part III particularly chapter 16 , the concepts of interpretation and meaning are seen as intertwined at the phenomenological core of an analysis of group cognition. Throughout the book, the recurrent themes of multiple interpretive perspectives and of the negotiation of shared meanings reveal the centrality of the interpretive approach.
There is a philosophy of interpretation, known since Aristotle as hermeneutics. A key principle of this hermeneutics is that one should interpret the meaning of a term based on the history of its effects in the world. Religious, political and philosophical concepts, for instance, have gradually evolved their meanings as they have interacted with world history and been translated from culture to culture.
Words like being , truth , knowledge, learning and thought have intricate histories that are encapsulated in their meaning, but that are hard to articulate. Rigorous interpretation of textual sources can begin to uncover the layers of meaning that have crystallized and become sedimented in these largely taken-for-granted words. If we now view meaning making and the production of knowledge as processes of interpretive social construction within communities, then the question arises of whether such fundamental processes can be facilitated by communication and computational technologies.
Can technology help groups to build knowledge? Can computer networks bring people together in global knowledge-building communities and support the interaction of their ideas in ways that help to transform the opinions of individuals into the knowledge of groups? As an inquiry into such themes, this book eschews an artificially systematic logic of presentation and, rather, gathers together textual artifacts that view concrete investigations from a variety of perspectives and situations.
My efforts to build software systems were not applications of theory in either the sense of foundational principles or predictive laws. Rather, the experience gained in the practical efforts of part I motivated more fundamental empirical research on computer-mediated collaboration in part II, which in turn led to the theoretical reflections of part III that attempt to develop ways of interpreting, conceptualizing and discussing the experience.
The theory part of this book was written to develop themes that emerged from the juxtaposition of the earlier, empirically-grounded studies. The original versions of the chapters were socially and historically situated. Concepts they developed while expressing their thoughts were, in turn, situated in the con-texts of those publications. In being collected into the present book, these papers have been only lightly edited to reduce redundancies and to identify cross-references. Consistency of terminology across chapters has not been enforced as much as it might be, in order to allow configurations of alternative terminologies to bring rich complexes of connotations to bear on the phenomena investigated.
In the essay, concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thought does not advance in a single direction, rather the aspects of the argument interweave as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of this texture. Actually, the thinker does not think, but rather transforms himself into an arena of intellectual experience, without simplifying it. The metaphor of prisms—that white light is an emergent property of the intertwining of its constituent wavelengths—is one of bringing a view into the light by splitting the illumination itself into a spectrum of distinct rays.
The view of collaboration that is expressed in this book itself emerged gradually, in a manner similar to the way that Prisms divulged its theories, as I intuitively pursued an inquiry into groupware design, communication analysis and social philosophy. While I have made some connections explicit, I also hope that the central meanings will emerge for each reader through his or her own interpretive interests.
In keeping with hermeneutic principles, I do not believe that my understanding of the connotations and interconnections of this text is an ultimate one; certainly, it is not a complete one, the only valid one, or the one most relevant to a particular reader.
Words are always open to different interpretations. The essays were very much written from my own particular and evolving perspective. They are linguistic artifacts that were central to the intellectual development of that perspective; they should be read accordingly, as situated within that gradually developing interpretation. It may help the reader to understand this book if some of the small groups that incubated its ideas are named.
Although most of the original papers were published under just my name, they are without exception collaborative products, artifacts of academic group cognition. Acknowledgements in the Notes section at the end of the book just indicate the most immediate intellectual debts.
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Already, due to collaboration technologies like the Web and email, our ideas are ineluctably the result of global knowledge building. Considered individually, there is little in the way of software features, research methodology or theoretical concept that is completely original here. Rather, available ideas have been assembled as so many tools or intellectual resources for making sense of collaboration as a process of constituting group knowing.
If anything is original, it is the mix and the twist of perspectives. Rather than wanting to claim that any particular insight or concept in this book is absolutely new, I would like to think that I have pushed rather hard on some of the ideas that are important to CSCL and brought a unique breadth of considerations to bear. In knowledge building, it is the configuration of existing ideas that counts and the intermingling of a spectrum of perspectives on those ideas. In particular, the ideas presented here have been developed through the work of certain knowledge-building groups or communities:.
They pioneered CSCL, working on pedagogical theory, system design and evaluation of computer-supported classroom practices. But today, knowledge building is a global enterprise and, at any rate, most of the foundational concepts—like knowledge, learning and meaning—have been forged in the millennia-long discourse of Western philosophy, whose history is reviewed periodically in the following chapters. When I launched into software development with a fresh degree in artificial intelligence, I worked eagerly at building cognitive aids—if not directly machine cognition—into my systems, developing rather complicated algorithms using search mechanisms, semantic representations, case-based reasoning, fuzzy logic and an involved system of hypermedia perspectives.
These mechanisms were generally intended to enhance the cognitive abilities of individual system users. When I struggled to get my students to use some of these systems for their work in class, I became increasingly aware of the many barriers to the adoption of such software. In reflecting on this, I began to conceptualize my systems as artifacts that mediated the work of users. It became clear that the hard part of software design was dealing with its social aspects. I switched my emphasis to creating software that would promote group interaction by providing a useful medium for interaction.
This led me to study collaboration itself, and to view knowledge building as a group effort. I used the software discussed in chapter 6 and began the analysis of the moment of collaboration that over the years evolved into chapter Briefly, a theory of social practice emphasizes the relational interdependency of agent and world, activity, meaning, cognition, learning and knowing. This theory of social practice can be traced back to Vygotsky. Vygotsky described what is distinctive to human cognition, psychological processes that are not simply biological abilities, as mediated cognition.
He analyzed how both signs words, gestures and tools instruments act as artifacts that mediate human thought and behavior—and he left the way open for other forms of mediation: Vygotsky attributes the concept of indirect or mediated activity to Hegel and Marx.
Where Hegel loved to analyze how two phenomena constitute each other dialectically—such as the master and slave, each of whose identity arises through their relationship to each other—Marx always showed how the relationships arose in concrete socio-economic history, such as the rise of conflict between the capitalist class and the working class with the establishment of commodity exchange and wage labor.
The minds, identities and social relations of individuals are mediated and formed by the primary factors of the contexts in which they are situated. In this book, mediation plays a central role in group cognition, taken as an emergent phenomenon of small-group collaboration. The computer support of collaboration is analyzed as a mediating technology whose design and use forms and transforms the nature of the interactions and their products. In popular and legal usage, it might refer to the intervention of a third party to resolve a dispute between two people.
The contact between the collaborators is not direct or im-mediate , but is mediated by the software. Recognizing that when human interaction takes place through a technological medium the technical characteristics influence—or mediate —the nature of the interaction, we can inquire into the effects of various media on collaboration. For a given task, for instance, should people use a text-based, asynchronous medium? How does this choice both facilitate and constrain their interaction? The classic analyses of mediation will reappear in the theoretical part of the book.
The term mediation —perhaps even more than other key terms in this book—takes on a variety of interrelated meanings and roles. These emerge gradually as the book unfolds; they are both refined and enriched—mediated—by relations with other technical terms.
The point for now is to start to think of group collaboration software as artifacts that mediate the cognition of their individual users and support the group cognition of their user community. Small groups are the engines of knowledge building. The knowing that groups build up in manifold forms is what becomes internalized by their members as individual learning and externalized in their communities as certifiable knowledge.
At least, that is a central premise of this book. The last several chapters of this book take various approaches to exploring the concept of group cognition, because this concept involves such a difficult, counter-intuitive way of thinking for many people.
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This is because cognition is often assumed to be associated with psychological processes contained in individual minds. The usual story, at least in Western culture of the past three hundred years, goes something like this: Language, in this view, is a medium for transferring meanings from one mind to another by representing reality. The recipient of a stated proposition understands its meaning based on his own sense experience as well as his rather unproblematic understanding of the meanings of language.
Figure goes approximately here. The story based on the mediation of group cognition is rather different: Language is a social product of the interaction of groups—not primarily of individuals—acting in the world in culturally mediated ways. Individuals who are socialized into the community learn to speak and understand language as part of their learning to participate in that community. In the process, they internalize the use of language as silent self-talk, internal dialog, rehearsed talk, narratives of rational accountability, senses of morality, conflicted dream lives, habits, personal identities and their tacit background knowledge largely preserved in language understanding.
In this story, cognition initially takes place primarily in group processes of inter-personal interaction, which include mother-child, best friends, husband-wife, teacher-student, boss-employee, extended family, social network, gang, tribe, neighborhood, community of practice, etc. The products of cognition exist in discourse, symbolic representations, meaningful gestures, patterns of behavior; they persist in texts and other inscriptions, in physical artifacts, in cultural standards and in the memories of individual minds.
Individual cognition emerges as a secondary effect, although it later seems to acquire a dominant role in our introspective narratives. Most people have trouble accepting the group-based story at first, and viewing collaborative phenomena in these terms. Therefore, the group emphasis will emerge gradually in this book, rather than being assumed from the start. Indeed, that is what happened during my decade-long inquiry that is documented in these studies.
Although one can see many examples of the decisive role of small groups in the CSCW and CSCL literature, their pivotal function is rarely explicitly acknowledged and reflected upon. For instance, the two prevailing paradigms of learning in CSCL—which are referred to in chapter 17 as the acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor—focus on the individual and the community, respectively, not on the intermediate small group.
In the later, learning consists in knowledgeable participation in a community of practice; for instance, an apprentice becomes a more skilled practitioner of a trade. But if one looks closely at the examples typically given to illustrate each paradigm, one sees that there is usually a small group at work in the specific learning situation. In a healthy classroom there are likely to be cliques of students learning together in subtle ways, even if the lesson is not organized as collaborative learning with formal group work.
Their group practices may or may not be structured in ways that support individual participants to learn as the group builds knowledge. In apprenticeship training, a master is likely to work with a few apprentices, and they work together in various ways as a small group; it is not as though all the apprentice tailors or carpenters or architects in a city are being trained together. The community of practice functions through an effective division into small working groups. Some theories, like activity theory, insist on viewing learning at both the individual and the community level.
Although their examples again typically feature small groups, the general theory highlights the individual and the large community, but has no theoretical representation of the critical small groups, in which the individuals carry on their concrete interactions and into which the community is hierarchically structured see chapter My own experience during the studies reported here and in my apprenticeships in philosophy and computer science that preceded them impressed upon me the importance of working groups, reading circles and informal professional discussion occasions for the genesis of new ideas and insights.
The same can be seen on a world-historical scale. Quantum jumps in human knowledge building emerge from centers of group interaction: The obvious question once we recognize the catalytic role of small groups in knowledge building is: Based on my experiences, documented in part I, I came to the conclusion that in order to achieve this goal we need a degree of understanding of small-group cognition that does not currently exist. In order to design effective media, we need to develop a theory of mediated collaboration through a design-based research agenda of analysis of small-group cognition.
Most theories of knowledge building in working and learning have focused primarily on the two extreme scales: We now need to focus on the intermediate scale: The size of groups can vary enormously. This book tends to focus on small groups of a few people say, three to five meeting for short periods. Given the seeming importance of this scale, it is surprising how little research on computer-supported collaboration has focused methodologically on units of this size.
Traditional approaches to learning—even to collaborative learning in small groups—measure effects on individuals. More recent writings talk about whole communities of practice. Most of the relatively few studies of collaboration that do talk of groups look at dyads, where interactions are easier to describe, but qualitatively different from those in somewhat larger groups. Even in triads, interactions are more complex and it is less tempting to attribute emergent ideas to individual members than in dyads. The emphasis on the group as unit of analysis is definitive of this book.
It is not just a matter of claiming that it is time to focus software development on groupware. It is also a methodological rejection of individualism as a focus of empirical analysis and cognitive theory. The book argues that software should support cooperative work and collaborative learning; it should be assessed at the group level and it should be designed to foster group cognition. This book provides different perspectives on the concept of group cognition, but the concept of group cognition as discourse is not fully or systematically worked out in detail. Neither are the complex layers of mediation presented, by which interactions at the small-group unit of analysis mediate between individuals and social structures.
This is because it is premature to attempt this—much empirical analysis is needed first. The conclusions of this book simply try to prepare the way for future studies of group cognition. Online workgroups are becoming increasingly popular, freeing learners and workers from the traditional constraints of time and place for schooling and employment. Commercial software offers basic mechanisms and media to support collaboration. However, we are still far from understanding how to work with technology to support collaboration in practice. Having borrowed technologies, research methodologies and theories from allied fields, it may now be time for the sciences of collaboration to forge their own tools and approaches, honed to the specifics of the field.
This book tries to explore how to create a science of collaboration support grounded in a fine-grained understanding of how people act, work, learn and think together. It approaches this by focusing the discussion of software design, interaction analysis and conceptual frameworks on central, paradigmatic phenomena of small-group collaboration, such as multiple interpretive perspectives, intersubjective meaning making and knowledge building at the group unit of analysis. The view of group cognition that emerges from the following essays is one worth working hard to support with technology.
Group cognition is presented in stronger terms than previous descriptions of distributed cognition. Here it is argued that high-level thinking and other cognitive activities take place in group discourse, and that these are most appropriately analyzed at the small-group unit of analysis. The focus on mediation of group cognition is presented more explicitly than elsewhere, suggesting implications for theory, methodology, design, and future research generally.
Technology in social contexts can take many paths of development in the near future. Globally networked computers provide a promise of a future of world-wide collaboration, founded upon small-group interactions. Reaching such a future will require overcoming the ideologies of individualism in system design, empirical methodology and collaboration theory, as well as in everyday practice.
This is a tall order. Today, many people react against the ideals of collaboration and the concept of group cognition based on unfortunate personal experiences, the inadequacies of current technologies and deeply ingrained senses of competition. Although so much working, learning and knowledge building takes place through teamwork these days, goals, conceptualizations and reward structures are still oriented toward individual achievement.
Collaboration is often feared as something that might detract from individual accomplishments, rather than valued as something that could facilitate a variety of positive outcomes for everyone. We need to continue designing software functionality and associated social practices; continue analyzing the social and cognitive processes that take place during successful collaboration; and continue theorizing about the nature of collaborative learning, working and acting with technology.
The studies in this book are attempts to do just that. They are not intended to provide final answers or to define recipes for designing software or conducting research. They do not claim to confirm the hypotheses, propose the theories or formulate the methodologies they call for. Rather, they aim to open up a suggestive view of these bewildering realms of inquiry.
I hope that by stimulating group efforts to investigate proposed approaches to design, analysis and theory, they can contribute in some modest measure to our future success in understanding, supporting and engaging in effective group cognition. The 21 chapters of this book were written over a number of years, while I was finding my way toward a conception of group cognition that could be useful for CSCL and CSCW. Only near the end of that period, in editing the essays into a unified book, did the coherence of the undertaking become clear to me.
In presenting these writings together, I think it is important to provide some guidance to the readers. The fact that the theory presented in this book comes at the end, emanating out of the design studies and the empirical analysis of collaboration, does not mean that the work described in the design studies of the first section had no theoretical framing.
They showed that people act based on their being situated in specific settings with particular activities, artifacts, histories and colleagues. Shared knowledge is not a stockpile of fixed facts that can be represented in a database and queried on all occasions, but an on-going accomplishment of concrete groups of people engaged in continuing communication and negotiation. Furthermore, knowing is fundamentally perspectival and interpretive. The idea was that one could build a software system to support designers in a given domain—say, kitchen design—by integrating such components as a drawing sketchpad, a palette of icons representing items from the domain stovetops, tables, walls , a set of critiquing rules sink under a window, dishwasher to the right , a hypertext of design rationale, a catalog of previous designs or templates, a searching mechanism, and a facility for adding new palette items, among others.
My dissertation system, Hermes , was a system that allowed one to put together a DODE for a given domain, and structure different professional perspectives on the knowledge in the system. Software designs contained in the studies of part I more or less start from this approach: This theoretical background is presented primarily in chapter 4. Before presenting that, however, I wanted to give a feel for the problematic nature of CSCL and CSCW by providing examples of designing software to support constructivist education chapter 1 , computational support for learning chapter 2 or algorithms for selecting group members chapter 3.
The eight case studies included in part I provide little windows upon illustrative experiences of designing software for collaborative knowledge building. They are not controlled experiments with rigorous conclusions. Each study contains a parable: They describe fragmentary experiments that pose questions and that, in their specificity and materiality, allow the feedback of reality to be experienced and pondered.
Some of the studies include technical details that may not be interesting or particularly meaningful to all readers. Indeed, it is hard to imagine many readers with proper backgrounds for easily following in detail all the chapters of this book. This is an unavoidable problem for interdisciplinary topics. The original papers for part I were written for specialists in computer science, and their details remain integral to the argumentation of the specific study, but not necessarily essential to the larger implications of the book. The book is structured so that readers can feel free to skip around.
Part I explores, in particular ways, some of the major forms of computer support that seem desirable for collaborative knowledge building, shared meaning making and group cognition. The first three chapters address the needs of individual teachers, students and group members, respectively, as they interact with shared resources and activities.
The individual perspective is then systematically matched with group perspectives in the next three chapters. The final chapters of part I develop a mechanism for moving knowledge among perspectives. Along the way, issues of individual, small-group and community levels are increasingly distinguished and supported. Support for group formation, perspectives and negotiation is prototyped and tested. The book starts with a gentle introduction to a typical application of designing computer support for collaboration.
It is a CSCW system in that it supports communities of professional teachers cooperating in their work. At the same time, it is a CSCL system that can help to generate, refine and propagate curriculum for collaborative learning by students, either online or otherwise. The study is an attempt to design an integrated knowledge-based system that supports five key functions associated with the development of innovative curriculum by communities of teachers.
Interfaces for the five functions are illustrated. The next study turns to computer support for students, either in groups or singly. The application, State the Essence , is a program that gives students feedback on summaries they compose from brief essays. Rather than focusing on student outcomes, the study describes some of the complexity of adapting an algorithmic technique to a classroom educational tool. The question in this study is: Developed for the American space agency to help them select groups of astronauts for the international space station, the Crew software modeled a set of psychological factors for subjects participating in a prolonged space mission.
Crew was designed to take advantage of psychological data being collected on outer-space, under-sea and Antarctic winter-over missions confining small groups of people in restricted spaces for prolonged periods. The software combined a number of statistical and AI techniques. This study was actually written earlier than the preceding ones, but it is probably best read following them. It describes at an abstract level the theoretical framework behind the design of the systems discussed in the other studies—it is perhaps also critical of some assumptions underlying their mechanisms.
It develops a concept of situated interpretation that arises from design theories and writings on situated cognition. These sources raised fundamental questions about traditional AI, based as it was on assumptions of explicit, objective, universal and rational knowledge. Hermes tried to capture and represent tacit, interpretive, situated knowledge. It was a hypermedia framework for creating domain-oriented design environments.
It provided design and software elements for interpretive perspectives, end-user programming languages and adaptive displays, all built upon a shared knowledge base.
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A critical transition occurs in this study, away from software that is designed to amplify human intelligence with AI techniques. It turns instead toward the goal of software designed to support group interaction by providing structured media of communication, sharing and collaboration. While TCA attempted to use an early version of the Internet to allow communities to share educational artifacts, CIE aimed to turn the Web into a shared workspace for a community of practice.
The specific community supported by the CIE prototype was the group of people who design and maintain local area computer networks LANs , for instance at university departments. WebGuide was a several-year effort to design support for interpretive perspectives, focusing on the key idea proposed by Hermes, computational perspectives, and trying to adapt the perspectivity concept to asynchronous threaded discussions. The design study was situated within the task of providing a shared guide to the Web for small workgroups and whole classrooms of students, including the classroom where Essence was developed.
Insights gained from adoption hurdles with this system motivated a push to better understand collaboration and computer-mediated communication, resulting in a WebGuide -supported seminar on mediation, which is discussed in this study. This seminar began the theoretical reflections that percolate through part II and then dominate in part III. The WebGuide system was a good example of trying to harness computational power to support the dynamic selection and presentation of information in accordance with different user perspectives. Several limitations of WebGuide led to the Synergeia design undertaking.
The WebGuide perspectives mechanism was too complicated for users, and additional collaboration supports were needed, in particular support for group negotiation. An established CSCW system was re-designed for classroom usage, including a simplified system of class, group and individual perspectives, and a mechanism for groups to negotiate agreement on shared knowledge-building artifacts. The text of this study began as a design scenario that guided development of Synergeia and then morphed into its training manual for teachers. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg.
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