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.