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Another computer-supported medium for collaborative knowledge building in the CSCL community – broadly and narrowly defined

I set up this blog as another experiment in designing and fielding computer-supported media for collaborative knowledge building in communities. More specifically, this is for information and discussion among CSCL researchers, people concerned with such tools.

The "CSCL community" can be broadly defined as a scattered set of people around the world who are investigating the use of digital technologies for learning in groups, large and small. But there are a growing number of institutional supports to aid and help define this community. The International Journal of CSCL is one of the newest such supports. It was sponsored by a somewhat more narrowly defined group called the “CSCL Community” that is formally represented by the CSCL Committee of ISLS (the International Society of the Learning Sciences). This CSCL Community is responsible for supervising ijCSCL and the CSCL conferences.

Within hours of launching this blog for the broad CSCL community, I heard that a new CSCL Committee of ISLS had been elected. The members are:

• Pierre Dillenbourg, Switzerland


• Cindy Hmelo-Silver, USA


• Chris Hoadley, USA


• Paul Kirschner, Netherlands


• Tim Koschmann, USA


• Naomi Miyake, Japan


• Claire O´Malley, UK


• Roy Pea, USA


• Hans Spada, Germany


• Gerry Stahl, USA


• Dan Suthers, USA


• Barbara Wasson, Norway

This blog can be used for information, discussion and collaboration in both the broader and narrower CSCL communities.

As I mentioned above, this blog is the latest in a series of CSCL media experiments I have been involved in. I began with my own home page at www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/ when the WorldWideWeb was just starting; my personal site has subsequently grown to over a gigabyte with 15,000 files. I started up isls.org and ijCSCL.org – both of which have since been professionally modernized. For my current research project, Virtual Math Teams, I started the wiki at mathforum.org/wiki/VMT/ and website at mathforum.org/vmt/. In association with my book on Group Cognition, I have not only maintained the text publicly online since its earliest draft at www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/mit/, but I created a listomania of related CSCL books at Amazon.com and added entries to wikipedia.org/ on CSCL and on group cognition.

In addition to these instances of using public electronic media, I have collaborated in the design of new media for small group learning contexts. In Colorado I worked with several colleagues in designing, implementing and testing WebGuide, an asynchronous threaded discussion forum. As part of a European Union project, I then designed BSCL, which combined the BSCW shared document spaces with simple asynchronous and synchronous tools. Currently, at Drexel I am working with the Virtual Math Teams project developing and analyzing the usage of the VMT-Chat synchronous text and graphics environment for collaborative math problem solving.

ijCSCL issue 2 now online -- issue 1 in print

The premier issue of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (ijCSCL vol. 1, no. 1) was showcased at the large conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA 2006) in San Francisco last April. It is now being mailed to all members of ISLS.

Issue one includes the following. Full text of this issue only is freely available at the Springer website

• Kienle & Wessner on the development of the CSCL community
• Jones, Dirckinck-Holmfeld & Lindström on a meso-level approach to CSCL
• Lee, Chan & van Aalst on peer assessment in CSCL
• Rick & Guzdial on situating a wiki in college courses
• Fuks, Pimentel & de Lucena on overcoming chat confusion
• Wegerif on dialogic understanding and thinking skills

Issue two is now in press. It is available freely with the prepublication proofs of the full text of all articles at the ijCSCL website. The official versions are also available electronically to all subscribers at the Springer site. Subscriptions are available for free to paid members of ISLS -- see http://www.isls.org/membership.html to join ISLS.

Issue two includes:

• Arnseth & Ludvigsen on systemic vs dialogic research in CSCL
• Kali on a design principles database
• Yukawa on co-reflection and narrative
• Oshima, et al. on Japanese science pedagogy
• Lonchamp on a generic model of chat

Both issues reflect the international character of the CSCL community. Issue one authors are from Germany, UK, Denmark, Sweden, China, Canada, US and Brazil. Issue two authors are from Norway, Israel, US, Japan and France.

For information on submitting papers to ijCSCL, go to http://ijcscl.org/. To volunteer to be a reviewer for the journal, send me an email.

ICLS 2006 conference June 27-July 1

The semi-annual International Conference of the Learning Sciences is coming soon. It promises to be a stimulating and important event. This conference alternates years with the CSCL conference, which will be held outside of New York City next summer.

There are a number of events at ICLS 2006 of direct relevance to the CSCL Community. Most importantly, there will be an open meeting of the CSCL Community early on June 30. This will be a first opportunity for the newly elected CSCL Committee of ISLS to meet together. This open meeting will include a brief meeting of the Editorial Board of ijCSCL, the International Journal of CSCL.

Among the events I am involved with are:

• A data session workshop on analyzing interaction in chat -- all day on June 27. Please contact me if you have some chat data you would like the group data session to look at.
  
• An interactive workshop on "Engaged Learning in Online Communities" the morning of June 28.
  
• A discussion of deictic referencing in a chat environment with shared whiteboard. This paper has been extended in a journal version in the Journal of Educational Research special issue on cognitive tools.

Welcome to the CSCL Community blog

This is a blog for the community of people around the world who are interested in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL).

Please contribute to this blog and share your news with the CSCL Community.

Everyone can add comments to posted news items. For permission to make posts or to send suggested links, send an email to the blog administrator at Gerry.Stahl @ drexel.edu.

This blog is intended to be a medium for our community to build knowledge together about the field of CSCL. Share your ideas and build upon the ideas of others here.