Essays on Technology, Interaction and Cognition

The promise of globally networked computers to usher in a new age of universal learning and of the sharing of human knowledge remains a distant dream; the software and social practices needed have yet to be conceived, designed and adopted. To support online collaboration, our technology and culture have to be re-configured to meet a bewildering set of constraints. Above all, this requires understanding how digital technology can mediate human collaboration. The collection of essays gathered in this volume documents one path of exploration of these challenges. It includes efforts to design software prototypes featuring specific collaboration support functionality, to analyze empirical instances of collaboration and to theorize about the issues, phenomena and concepts involved today in supporting collaborative knowledge building.

The studies in this book grapple with the problem of how to increase opportunities for effective collaborative working, learning and acting through innovative uses of computer technology. From a technological perspective, the possibilities seem endless and effortless. The ubiquitous linking of computers in local and global networks makes possible the sharing of thoughts by people who are separated spatially or temporally. Brainstorming and critiquing of ideas can be conducted in many-to-many interactions, without being confined by a sequential order imposed by the inherent limitations of face-to-face meetings and classrooms. Negotiation of consensual decisions and group knowledge can be conducted in new ways.

Collaboration of the future will be more complex than just chatting—verbally or electronically—with a friend. The computational power of personal computers can lend a hand here; software can support the collaboration process and help to manage its complexity. It can organize the sharing of communication, maintaining both sociability and privacy. It can personalize information access to different user perspectives and can order knowledge proposals for group negotiation.

Computer support can help us transcend the limits of individual cognition. It can facilitate the formation of small groups engaged in deep knowledge building. It can empower such groups to construct forms of group cognition that exceed what the group members could achieve as individuals. Software functionality can present, coordinate and preserve group discourse that contributes to, constitutes and represents shared understandings, new meanings and collaborative learning that is not attributable to any one person but that is achieved in group interaction.

Initial attempts to engage in the realities of computer-supported knowledge building have, however, encountered considerable technical and social barriers. The transition to this new mode of interaction is in some ways analogous to the passage from oral to literate culture, requiring difficult changes and innovations on multiple levels and over long stretches of time. But such barriers signal opportunities. By engaging in experimental attempts at computer-supported, small-group collaboration and carefully observing where activity breaks down, one can identify requirements for new software.

The design studies below explore innovative functionality for collaboration software. They concentrate especially on mechanisms to support group formation, multiple interpretive perspectives and the negotiation of group knowledge. The various applications and research prototypes reported in the first part of this book span the divide between cooperative work and collaborative learning, helping us to recognize that contemporary knowledge workers must be lifelong learners, and also that collaborative learning requires flexible divisions of labor.

The attempt to design and adopt collaboration software led to a realization that we need to understand much more clearly the social and cognitive processes involved. In fact, we need a multi-faceted theory for computer-supported collaboration, incorporating empirically-based analyses and concepts from many disciplines. This book, in its central part, pivots around the example of an empirical micro-analysis of small-group collaboration. In particular, it looks at how the group constructs intersubjective knowledge that appears in the group discourse itself, rather than theorizing about what takes place in the minds of the individual participants.

The notion that it is important to take the group, rather than the individual, as the unit of analysis ultimately requires developing, from the ground up, a new theory of collaboration in the book’s final part. This theory departs from prevalent cognitive science, grounded as it is on mental representations of individuals. Such a theory builds on related efforts in social-cultural theory, situated cognition and ethnomethodology, as well as their post-Kantian philosophical roots.

Collaboration as Group Cognition

This book does not aspire to the impossible task of describing all the ways that technology does or could impact upon working and learning. I work and I learn in innumerable ways and modes—and everyone else works and learns in additional ways, many different from mine. Working and learning with other people mixes these ways into yet more complex varieties. Technology multiplies the possibilities even more. So this book chooses to focus on a particular form of working and learning; one that seems especially attractive to many people and may be particularly responsive to technological support, but one that is also rather hard to point out and observe in the current world. It is the holy grail of cooperative knowledge work and collaborative learning: the emergence of shared group cognition through effective collaborative knowledge building.

The goal of collaborative knowledge building is much more specific than that of e-learning or distance education generally, where computer networks are used to communicate and distribute information from a teacher to geographically dispersed students. As collaborative knowledge building, it stresses supporting interactions among the students themselves, with a teacher playing more of a facilitating than instructing role. Moreover, knowledge building involves the construction or further development of some kind of knowledge artifact. That is, the students are not simply socializing and exchanging their personal reactions or opinions about the subject matter, but might be developing a theory, model, diagnosis, conceptual map, mathematical proof or presentation. These activities require the exercise of high level cognitive activities. In effective collaborative knowledge building, the group must engage in thinking together about a problem or task, and produce a knowledge artifact such as a verbal problem clarification, a textual solution proposal or a more developed theoretical inscription that integrates their different perspectives on the topic and represents a shared group result that they have negotiated.

We all know from personal experience—or think we know based on our tacit acceptance of prevalent folk theories—that individual people can think and learn on their own. It is harder to understand how a small group of people collaborating online can think and learn as a group, and not just as the sum of the people in the group thinking and learning individually.

Ironically, the counter-intuitive notion of group cognition turns out to be easier to study than individual learning. Whereas individual cognition is hidden in private mental processes, group cognition is necessarily publicly visible. This is because any ideas involved in a group interaction must be displayed in order for the members of the group to participate in the collaborative process. In this book, I try to take advantage of such displays to investigate group cognition without reducing it to an epiphenomenon of individual cognition. This does not mean that I deny that individuals have private thoughts: merely, that I do not rely on our common-sense intuitions and introspections about such thoughts. In the end, consideration focused on the group unit may have implications for understanding individual cognition as a socially grounded and mediated product of group cognition.

How does a group build its collective knowing? A non-cognitivist approach avoids speculating on psychological processes hidden in the heads of individuals and instead looks to empirically observable group processes of interaction and discourse. The roles of individuals in the group are not ignored, but are viewed as multiple interpretive perspectives that can conflict, stimulate, intertwine and be negotiated. The spatio-temporal world in which collaborative interactions are situated is not assumed to be composed of merely physical as opposed to mental ideas, but is seen as a universe filled with meaningful texts and other kinds of artifacts—human-made objects that embody shared meanings in physical, symbolic, digital, linguistic and cultural forms.

The concern with the processes and possibilities of building group knowing has implications for the choice of themes investigated in this book. The software prototypes reported on in part I, for instance, were attempts to support the formation of teams that had the right mix for building knowledge as a group, to represent the multiple perspectives involved in developing group ideas, and to facilitate the negotiation of group knowledge that arose. Certainly, there are other important processes in online collaboration, but these are of particular concern for small-group knowledge building. Similarly, the empirical analysis in part II zooms in on the way in which the participants in an observed group of students constructed knowledge in their discourse that could not be attributed to any simple conjunction of their individual contributions. Finally, the theoretical reflections of part III try to suggest a conceptual framework that incorporates these notions of “interpretive perspectives” or “knowledge negotiation” within a coherent view of how group cognition takes place in a world of discourse, artifacts and computer media.

Rather than centering on practical design goals for CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) industrial settings or CSCL (computer-supported collaborative learning) classrooms, the following chapters explore foundational issues of how small groups can construct meaning at the group level. The ability of people to engage in effective group cognition in the past has been severely constrained by physical limits of the human body and brain—we can only really relate to a small number of individual people at a time or follow one primary train of thought at a time, and most business meetings or classroom activities are structured, moderated and delimited accordingly. Moreover, we quickly forget many of the details of what was said at such meetings. Collaboration technology has enormous potential to establish many-to-many interactions, to help us manage them, and to maintain logs of what transpired. Figuring out how to design and deploy collaboration technologies and social practices to achieve this still-distant potential is the driving force that is struggling to speak through these essays.

The structure of the book follows the broad strokes of my historical path of inquiry into computer-supported group cognition. Part I reports on several attempts to design online technologies to support the collaborative building of knowing, i.e., computer-mediated group sense making, in which I was involved. Part II shows how I responded to the need I subsequently felt to better understand phenomena of collaboration, such as group formation, perspective sharing and knowledge negotiation through micro-analysis of group interaction, in order to guide such software design. In turn, part III indicates how this led me to formulate a conceptual framework and a research methodology: a theory of collaboration, grounded in empirical practice and exploration. Although theory is typically presented as a solid foundational starting point for practice, this obfuscates its genesis as a conceptual reflection in response to problems of practice and their circumstances; I have tried to avoid such reification by presenting theory at the end, as it emerged as a result of design efforts and empirical inquiry.

The Problematic of CSCL and the Approach of this Book

This book documents my engagement with the issues of CSCL as a research field. Although I believe that much of the group cognition approach presented is also applicable to CSCW, my own research during the decade represented here was more explicitly oriented to the issues that dominated CSCL at the time. In particular, CSCL is differentiated from related domains in the following ways:

· Group: the focus is not on individual learning, but learning in and by small groups of students.

· Cognition: the group activity is not one of working, but of constructing new understanding and meaning within contexts of instruction and learning.

· Computer support: the learning does not take place in isolation, but with support by computer-based tools, functionality, micro-worlds, media and networks.

· Building: the concern is not with the transmission of known facts, but with the construction of personally meaningful knowledge.

· Collaborative: the interaction of participants is not competitive or accidental, but involves systematic efforts to work and learn together.

· Knowledge: the orientation is not to drill and practice of specific elementary facts or procedural skills, but to discussion, debate, argumentation and deep understanding.

The fact that these points spell out the title of this book is an indication that the book consists of an extended reflection upon the defining problems of CSCL.

The history of CSCL research and theory can be schematically viewed as a gradual progression of ever-increasing critical distance from its starting point, consisting of conceptualizations of learning inherited from dominant traditions in the fields of education and psychology. Much of the early work in CSCL started from this individualistic notion of learning and cognition. For instance, the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on CSCL—which can be seen particularly clearly in my first three studies—often relied on computational cognitive models of individual learners. For me, at least, dramatic shifts away from this tradition came from the following sources:

· Mediated Cognition: Vygotsky’s work from the 1920’s and 1930’s only became available in English 50 years later, when it proposed a radically different view of cognition and learning as socially and collaboratively mediated.

· Distributed Cognition: This alternative developed by a number of writers (e.g., Suchman, Winograd, Pea, Hutchins) also stressed the importance of not viewing the mind as isolated from artifacts and other people.

· Situated Learning: Lave’s work applied the situated perspective to learning, showing how learning can be viewed as a community process.

· Knowledge building: Scardamalia and Bereiter developed the notion of community learning with a model of collaborative knowledge building in computer-supported classrooms.

· Meaning making: Koschmann argued for re-conceptualizing knowledge building as meaning making, drawing upon theories of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology.

· Group Cognition: This book arrives at a theory of group cognition by pushing this progression a bit further with the help of a series of software implementation studies, empirical analyses of interaction and theoretical reflections on knowledge building.

The notion of group cognition emerged out of the trajectory of the research that is documented in this volume. The software studies in the early chapters attempted to provide support for collaborative knowledge building. They assumed that collaborative knowledge building consisted primarily of forming a group, facilitating interaction among the multiple personal perspectives brought together, and then encouraging the negotiation of shared knowledge. When the classroom use of my software resulted in disappointing levels of knowledge building, I tried to investigate in more detail how knowledge building occurs in actual instances of collaborative learning.

The explorative essays in the middle of the book prepare the way for that analysis and then carry out a micro-analysis of one case. The fundamental discovery made in that analysis was that, in small-group collaboration, meaning is created across the utterances of different people. That is, the meaning that is created is not a cognitive property of individual minds, but a characteristic of the group dialog. This is a striking result of looking closely at small-group discussions; it is not so visible in monologues (although retrospectively these can be seen as internalized discourses of multiple voices), in dialogues (where the utterances each appear to reflect the ideas of one or the other member of the dyad) or in large communities (where the joint meaning becomes fully anonymous). I call this result of collaborative knowledge building group cognition.

For me, this discovery—already implied in certain social science methodologies like conversation analysis—led to a conception of group cognition as central to understanding collaboration, and consequently required a re-thinking of the entire theoretical framework of CSCL: collaboration, knowledge, meaning, theory building, research methodology, design of support. The paradigm shift from individual cognition to group cognition is challenging—even for people who think they already accept the paradigms of mediated, distributed and situated cognition. For this reason, the essays in the last part of the book not only outline what I feel is necessary for an appropriate theory, but provide a number of reflections on the perspective of group cognition itself. While the concept of group cognition that I develop is closely related to findings from situated cognition, dialogic theory, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and social psychology, I think that my focus on small-group collaboration casts it in a distinctive light particularly relevant to CSCL. Most importantly, I try to explore the core phenomenon in more detail than other writers, who tend to leave some of the most intriguing aspects as mysteries.

Accomplishing this exposition on group cognition requires spelling out a number of inter-related points, each complex in itself. A single conference or journal paper can only enunciate one major point. This book is my attempt to bring the whole argument together. I have organized the steps in this argument into three major book parts:

Part I, Computer Support for Collaboration, presents eight studies of technology design. The first three apply various AI approaches (abbreviated as DODE, LSA, CBR) to typical CSCL or CSCW applications, attempting to harness the power of advanced software techniques to support knowledge building. The next two shift the notion of computer support from AI to providing collaboration media. The final three try to combine these notions of computer support by creating computational support for core collaboration functions in the computational medium. Specifically, the chapters discuss how to:

1. Support teacher collaboration for constructivist curriculum development. (written in 1995)

2. Support student learning of text production in summarization. (1999)

3. Support formation of effective groups of people to work together. (1996)

4. Define the notion of personal interpretive perspectives of group members. (1993)

5. Define the role of computational media for collaborative interactions. (2000)

6. Support group and personal perspectives. (2001)

7. Support group work in collaborative classrooms. (2002)

8. Support negotiation of shared knowledge by small groups. (2002)

Part II, Analysis of Collaborative Knowledge Building, consists of five essays related to research methodology for studying small-group interaction. 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. This case reveals how group cognition creates shared meaning through the thick interdependencies of everyone’s utterances. It also shows how the group builds knowledge about meaning in the world. In particular, these chapters provide:

9. A process model of collaborative knowledge building, incorporating perspectives and negotiation. (2000)

10. A critique of CSCL research methodologies that obscure the collaborative phenomena. (2001)

11. A theoretical framework for empirical analysis of collaboration. (2001)

12. Analysis of five students building knowledge about a computer simulation. (2001)

13. Analysis of the shared meaning that they built and its relation to the design of the software artifact. (2004)

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 13. 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. Chapter 18 develops the alternative research methodology hinted at in chapter 10. 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:

14. A review of traditional theories of communication. (2003)

15. A sketch of a theory of building collaborative knowing. (2003)

16. An analysis of the relationship of group meaning and individual interpretation. (2003)

17. An investigation of group meaning as common ground versus as group cognition. (2004)

18. A methodology for making group cognition visible to researchers. (2004)

19. Consideration of the question, “Can groups think?” in parallel to the AI question, “Can computers think?” (2004)

20. Exploration of philosophical directions for group cognition theory. (2004)

21. A wrap-up of the book and an indication of future work. (2004)

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.

Situated Concepts

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: that knowledge emerges from situated activities involving concrete social interactions and settings, and that such knowledge can be encapsulated in vocabularies and texts that are colored by the circumstances of their origins.

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. The meaning of central concepts, like “group cognition,” are not simply defined; they evolve from chapter to chapter, in the hope that they will continue to grow productively in the future.

Concepts can no longer be treated as fixed, self-contained, eternal, universal and rational, for they reflect a radically historical world. The modern age of the last several centuries may have questioned the existence of God more than the medieval age, but it still maintained an unquestioned faith in a god’s-eye view of reality. 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. Some propositions in natural language are also true, like, “This sentence is declarative.” But others are controversial, such as, “Knowledge is socially mediated,” and some are even paradoxical: “This sentence is false.”

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. to be accepted within a scientific community; that is, to evolve into knowledge. 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. Interpretation is central. 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. Gadamer (1960/1988) formulated a contemporary version of philosophical hermeneutics, based largely on ideas proposed by his teacher, Heidegger (1927/1996). 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.

These studies strive to be essays in the postmodern sense described by Adorno (1958/1984, p. 160f):

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. … All of its concepts are presentable in such a way that they support one another, that each one articulates itself according to the configuration that it forms with the others.

In Adorno’s book Prisms (1967), essays on specific authors and composers provide separate glimpses of art and artists, but there is no development of a general aesthetic theory that illuminates them all. Adorno’s influential approach to cultural criticism emerged from the book as a whole, implicit in the configuration of concrete studies, but nowhere in the book articulated in propositions or principles. His analytic paradigm—which rejected the fashionable focus on biographical details of individual geniuses or eccentric artists in favor of reflection on social mediations made visible in the workings of the art work or artifacts themselves—was too incommensurable with prevailing habits of thought to persuade an audience without providing a series of experiences that might gradually shift the reader’s perspective. 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. To publish is to contribute to a larger discourse, to expose one’s words to unanticipated viewpoints. Words are always open to different interpretations.

The chronology of the studies has generally been roughly maintained within each of the book’s parts, for they document a path of discovery, with earlier essays anticipating what was later elaborated. The goal in assembling this collection has been to provide readers with an intellectual experience open-ended enough that they can collaborate in making sense of the enterprise as a whole—to open up “an arena of intellectual experience” without distorting or excessively delimiting it, so that it can be shared and interpreted from diverse perspectives.

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.

Collaborating with Groups

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. 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:

· The very notion of knowledge-building communities was proposed by Scardamalia and Bereiter and the CSILE research group at Toronto. They pioneered CSCL, working on pedagogical theory, system design and evaluation of computer-supported classroom practices.

· They cited the work of Lave and Wenger on situated learning, a distillation of ideas brewing in an active intellectual community in the San Francisco Bay area that had a formative impact on CSCW in the 1970’s.

· The socio-cultural theory elaborated there, in turn, had its roots in Vygotsky and his circle, which rose out of the Russian revolution; the activity theory that grew out of that group’s thinking still exerts important influences in the CSCW and CSCL communities.

· The personal experience behind this book is perhaps most strongly associated with:

o McCall, Fischer and the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design in Colorado, where I studied, collaborated and worked on Hermes and CIE in the early 1990’s (see chapters 4 & 5);

o the Computers & Society research group led by Herrmann at the University of Dortmund (now at Bochum), that collaborated on WebGuide and negotiation support (chapters 6 & 9);

o Owen Research, Inc., where TCA and the Crew software for NASA were developed (chapters 1 & 3);

o the Institute for Cognitive Science at Boulder, where State the Essence was created (chapter 2);

o the ITCOLE Project in the European Union (2001-02), in which I designed BSCL and participated as a visiting scientist in the CSCW group at Fraunhofer-FIT (chapters 7 & 8);

o the research community surrounding the conferences on computer support for collaborative learning, where I was Program Chair in 2002 (chapter 11); and

o the Virtual Math Teams Project that colleagues and I launched at Drexel University in 2003 (chapter 21).

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.

Technology as Mediation

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.

As I became more interested in software as mediator, I organized a seminar on “computer mediation of collaborative learning” with colleagues and graduate students from different fields. I used the software discussed in chapter 6 and began the analysis of the moment of collaboration that over the years evolved into chapter 12. We tried to deconstruct the term mediation, as used in CSCL, by uncovering the history of the term’s effects that are sedimented in the word’s usage today. We started with its contemporary use in Lave & Wenger’s Situated Learning (1991, pp 50f):

Briefly, a theory of social practice emphasizes the relational interdependency of agent and world, activity, meaning, cognition, learning and knowing. … Knowledge of the socially constituted world is socially mediated and open ended.

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: “A host of other mediated activities might be named; cognitive activity is not limited to the use of tools or signs” (Vygotsky, 1930/1978, p. 55).

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.

“Mediation” is a complex and unfamiliar term. In popular and legal usage, it might refer to the intervention of a third party to resolve a dispute between two people. In philosophy, it is related to “media,” “middle” and “intermediate.” So in CSCL or CSCW, we can say that a software environment provides a medium for collaboration, or that it plays an intermediate role in the midst of the collaborators. 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? If the software intervenes between collaborating people, how should it represent them to each other so as to promote social bonding and understanding of each other’s work?

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.

Mediation by Small Groups

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. This is because cognition is often assumed to be associated with psychological processes contained in individual minds.

Text Box:
Figure 0-1. The Thinker. Auguste Rodin. Bronze. 1881. The usual story, at least in Western culture of the past three hundred years, goes something like this: an individual experiences reality through his senses (sic: the paradigmatic rational thinker in this tradition is often assumed to be male). He thinks about his experience in his mind; “cognition,” stemming from the Latin “cogito” for “I think,” refers to mental activities that take place in the individual thinker’s head (see figure 0-1). He may articulate a mental thought by putting it into language, stating it as a linguistic proposition whose truth value is a function of the proposition’s correspondence with a state of affairs in the world. 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 0-1 goes approximately here

The story based on the mediation of group cognition is rather different: here, language is an infinitely generative system of symbolic artifacts that encapsulate and embody the cultural experiences of a community. 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 former paradigm, learning consists in the acquisition of knowledge by an individual; for instance, a student acquires facts from a teacher’s lesson. 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 21).

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 Bauhaus designers at Weimar, the post-impressionist artists in Paris salons, the Vienna Circle, the Frankfurt School—in the past, these communities were necessarily geographic locations where people could come together in small groups at the same time and place.

The obvious question once we recognize the catalytic role of small groups in knowledge building is: can we design computer-supported environments to create effective groups across time and space? 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: the individual unit of analysis as the acquirer of knowledge and the community unit of analysis as the context within which participation takes place. We now need to focus on the intermediate scale: the small-group unit of analysis as the discourse in which knowledge actually emerges.

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.

The Promise of Collaborating with Technology

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. The specter of “group-think”—where crowd mentality overwhelms individual rationality—is used as an argument against collaboration, rather than as a motivation for understanding better how to support healthy collaboration.

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.

Introduction to Part I: Studies of Technology Design

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. Therefore, I will provide brief introductions to the parts and the chapters, designed to re-situate the essays in the book’s mission.

Theoretical Background to Part I

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. On the contrary, in the early 1990’s when I turned my full-time attention to issues of CSCL, my academic training in computer science, artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science, which immediately preceded these studies, was particularly influenced by two theoretical orientations: situated cognition and domain-oriented design environments.

Situated cognition. As a graduate student, I met with a small reading group of fellow students for several years, discussing the then recent works of situated cognition (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Donald, 1991; Dreyfus, 1991; Ehn, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Schön, 1983; Suchman, 1987; Winograd & Flores, 1986), which challenged the assumptions of traditional AI. These writings proposed the centrality of tacit knowledge, implicitly arguing that AI’s reliance on capturing explicit knowledge was inadequate for modeling or replacing human understanding. 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.

Domain-oriented design environments. I was at that time associated with the research lab of the Center for Life-Long Learning & Design (L³D) directed by Gerhard Fischer, which developed the DODE (domain-oriented design environment) approach to software systems for designers (Fischer et al., 1993; Fischer, 1994; Fischer et al., 1998). 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. I adapted Hermes to create a DODE for lunar habitat designers. Software designs contained in the studies of part I more or less start from this approach: TCA was a DODE for teachers designing curriculum and CIE was a DODE for computer network designers.

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 Studies in Part I

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. These studies hang together rather like the years of a modern-day life, darting off in unexpected directions, but without ever losing the connectedness of one’s identity, one’s evolving, yet enduring personal perspective on the world.

Each study contains a parable: a brief, idiosyncratic and inscrutable tale whose moral is open to—indeed begs for—interpretation and debate. 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. There is an intended flow to the argument of the book—summarized in these introductions to the three parts—but the chapters are each self-contained essays that can largely stand on their own or be visited in accordance with each reader’s particular needs.

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.

Study 1, TCA. The book starts with a gentle introduction to a typical application of designing computer support for collaboration. The application is the Teachers Curriculum Assistant, a system for helping teachers to share curriculum that responds to educational research’s recommendation of constructivist learning. 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.

Study 2, Essence. 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. Significantly increasing students’ or groups’ time-on-task and encouraging them to create multiple drafts of their essays before submitting them to a teacher, the software uses a statistical analysis of natural language semantics to evaluate and compare texts. Rather than focusing on student outcomes, the study describes some of the complexity of adapting an algorithmic technique to a classroom educational tool.

Study 3, CREW. The question in this study is: how can software predict the behavior of a group of people working together under special conditions? 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.

Study 4, Hermes. 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.

Study 5, CIE. 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.

Study 6, WebGuide. 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.

Study 7, Synergeia. 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.

Study 8, BSCL. This study takes a closer look at the design rationale for the negotiation mechanism of the previous study. The BSCL system illustrates designs for several important functions of collaborative learning: formation of groups (by the teacher); perspectives for the class, small work groups and individuals; and negotiation of shared knowledge artifacts. These functions are integrated into the mature BSCW software system, with support for synchronous chat and shared whiteboard, asynchronous threaded discussion with note types, social awareness features, and shared workspaces (folder hierarchies for documents). The central point of this study is that negotiation is not just a matter of individuals voting based on their preconceived ideas; it is a group process of constructing knowledge artifacts and then establishing a consensus that the group has reached a shared understanding of this knowledge, and that it is ready to display it for others.

The chapters of part I demonstrate a progression that was not uncommon in CSCL and CSCW around the turn of the century. A twentieth century fascination with technological solutions reached its denouement in AI systems that required more effort than expected and provided less help than promised. In the twenty-first century, researchers acknowledged that systems needed to be user-centric and should concentrate on taking the best advantage of human and group intelligence. In this new context, the important thing for groupware was to optimize the formation of effective groups, help them to articulate and synthesize different knowledge-building perspectives, and support the negotiation of shared group knowledge. This shift should become apparent in the progression of software studies in part I.

Share Globally, Adapt Locally

For this project, I worked with several colleagues in Boulder, Colorado, to apply what we understood of educational theory and approaches to computer support of collaboration to the plight of classroom teachers. Constructivist approaches to learning were well established as being favored by most educational researchers. The problem was to disseminate this to teachers in the actual classrooms. Even when teachers were trained in the theory, they had no practical instructional materials to implement the new approach on a daily basis. There were few textbooks or other resources available; even if materials were located, the teachers would still have to spend vast amounts of time they did not have to integrate them into the classroom practices and the institutional requirements.

The Internet was just starting to reach public schools, so we tried to devise computer-based supports for disseminating constructivist resources and for helping teachers to practically adapt and apply them. We prototyped a high-functionality design environment for communities of teachers to construct innovative lesson plans together, using a growing database of appropriately structured and annotated resources. This was an experiment in designing a software system for teachers to engage in collaborative knowledge building.

This study provides a nice example of a real-world problem confronting teachers. It tries to apply the power of AI and domain-oriented design environment technologies to support collaboration at a distance. The failure of the project to go forward beyond the design phase indicates the necessity of considering more carefully the institutional context of schooling and the intricacies of potential interaction among classroom teachers.

Introduction

Many teachers yearn to break through the confines of traditional textbook-centered teaching and present activities that encourage students to explore and construct their own knowledge. But this requires developing innovative materials and curriculum tailored to local students. Teachers have neither the time nor the information to do much of this from scratch.

The Internet provides a medium for globally sharing innovative educational resources. School districts and teacher organizations have already begun to post curriculum ideas on Internet servers. However, just storing unrelated educational materials on the Internet does not by itself solve the problem. It is too hard to find the resources to meet specific needs. Teachers need software for locating material-rich sites across the network, searching the individual curriculum sources, adapting retrieved materials to their classrooms, organizing these resources in coherent lesson plans and sharing their experiences across the Internet.

In response to these needs, I designed and prototyped a Teacher’s Curriculum Assistant (TCA) that provides software support for teachers to make effective use of educational resources posted to the Internet. TCA maintains information for finding educational resources distributed on the Internet. It provides query and browsing mechanisms for exploring what is available. Tools are included for tailoring retrieved resources, creating supplementary materials and designing innovative curriculum. TCA encourages teachers to annotate and upload successfully used curriculum to Internet servers in order to share their ideas with other educators. In this chapter I describe the need for such computer support and discuss what I have learned from designing TCA.

The Internet’s Potential for Collaboration Support

The Internet has the potential to transform educational curriculum development beyond the horizons of our foresight. In 1994, the process was just beginning, as educators across the country started to post their favorite curriculum ideas for others to share. Already, this first tentative step revealed the difficulties inherent in using such potentially enormous, loosely structured sources of information. As the Internet becomes a more popular medium for sharing curricula, teachers, wandering around the Internet looking for ideas to use in their classrooms, confront a set of problems that will not go away on its own¾on the contrary:

1. Teachers have to locate sites of curriculum ideas scattered across the network; there is currently no system for announcing the locations of these sites.

2. They have to search through the offerings at each site for useful items. While some sites provide search mechanisms for their databases, each has different interfaces, tools and indexing schemes that must be learned before the curricula can be accessed.

3. They have to adapt items they find to the needs of their particular classroom: to local standards, the current curriculum, their own teaching preferences and the needs or learning styles of their various students.

4. They have to organize the new ideas within coherent curricula that build toward long-term pedagogical goals.

5. They have to share their experiences using the curriculum or their own new ideas with others who use the resources.

In many fields, professionals have turned to productivity software—like spreadsheets for accountants—to help them manage tasks involving complex sources of information. I believe that teachers should be given similar computer-based tools to meet the problems listed above. If this software is designed to empower teachers¾perhaps in conjunction with their students¾in open-ended ways, opportunities will materialize that we cannot now imagine.

In this chapter, I consider how the sharing of curriculum ideas over the Internet can be made more effective in transforming education. I advance the understanding of specific issues in the creation of software designed to help classroom teachers develop curricula and increase productivity, and introduce the Teacher’s Curriculum Assistant (TCA) that I built for this purpose. First, I discuss the nature of constructivist curriculum, contrasting it with traditional approaches based on behaviorist theory. Then I present an example of a problem-solving environment for high school mathematics students. The example illustrates why teachers need help to construct this kind of student-centered curriculum. I provide a scenario of a teacher developing a curriculum using productivity software like TCA, and conclude by discussing some issues I feel will be important in maximizing the effectiveness of the Internet as a medium for the dissemination of innovative curricula for educational reform.

The Problem of Curriculum in Educational Reform

The distribution of curriculum over the Internet and the use of productivity software for searching and adapting posted ideas could benefit any pedagogical approach. However, it is particularly crucial for advancing reform in education.

The barriers to educational reform are legion, as many people since John Dewey have found. Teachers, administrators, parents and students must all be convinced that traditional schooling is not the most effective way to provide an adequate foundation for life in the future. They must be trained in the new sensitivities required. Once everyone agrees and is ready to implement the new approach there is still a problem: what activities and materials should be presented on a day to day basis? This concrete question is the one that Internet sharing can best address. I generalize the term curriculum to cover this question.

Consider curricula for mathematics. Here, the reform approach is to emphasize the qualitative understanding of mathematical ways of thinking, rather than to stress rote memorization of quantitative facts or “number skills.” Behaviorist learning theory supported the view that one method of training could work for all students; reformers face a much more complex challenge. There is a growing consensus among educational theorists that different students in different situations construct their understandings in different ways (Greeno, 1993). This approach is often called constructivism or constructionism (Papert, 1993). It implies that teachers must creatively structure the learning environments of their students to provide opportunities for discovery and must guide the individual learners to reach insights in their own ways.

Behaviorism and constructivism differ primarily in their views of how students build their knowledge. Traditional, rationalist education assumed that there was a logical sequence of facts and standard skills that had to be learned successively. The problem was simply to transfer bits of information to students in a logical order, with little concern for how students acquire knowledge. Early attempts at designing educational software took this approach to its extreme, breaking down curricula into isolated atomic propositions and feeding these predigested facts to the students. This approach to education was suited to the industrial age, in which workers on assembly lines performed well-defined, sequential tasks.

According to constructivism, learners interpret problems in their environments using conceptual frameworks that they developed in the past (Roschelle, 1996). In challenging cases, problems can require changes in the frameworks. Such conceptual change is the essence of learning: one’s understanding evolves in order to comprehend one’s environment. To teach a student a mathematical method or a scientific theory is not to place a set of propositional facts into her mind, but to give her a new tool that she can make her own and use in her own ways in comprehending her world.

Constructivism does not entail the rejection of a curriculum. Rather, it requires a more complex and flexible curriculum. Traditionally, a curriculum consisted of a textual theoretical lesson, a set of drills for students to practice and a test to evaluate if the students could perform the desired behaviors. In contrast, a constructivist curriculum might target certain cognitive skills, provide a setting of resources and activities to serve as a catalyst for the development of these skills and then offer opportunities for students to articulate their evolving understandings (NCTM, 1989). The cognitive skills in math, for example, might include qualitative reasoning about graphs, number lines, algorithms or proofs.

My colleagues on the project and I believe that the movement from viewing a curriculum as fact-centered to viewing it as cognitive-tool-centered is appropriate for the post-modern (post-industrial, post-rationalist, post-behaviorist) period. Cognitive tools include, importantly, alternative knowledge representations (Norman, 1993). As researchers in artificial intelligence, we know that knowledge representations are key to characterizing or modeling cognition. We have also found that professionals working in typical contemporary occupations focus much of their effort on developing and using alternative knowledge representations that are adapted to their tasks (Sumner, 1995). Curricula to prepare people for the next generation of jobs would do well to familiarize students with the creation and use of alternative conceptual representations.

A Diverse Learning Ecology

Teachers need help to create learning environments that stimulate the construction and evolution of understanding through student exploration using multiple conceptual representations. A stimulating learning environment is one with a rich ecology, in which many elements interact in subtle ways. In this section I present an illustration of a rich ecology for learning mathematical thinking that includes: inductive reasoning, recursive computation, spreadsheet representation, graphing, simultaneous equations and programming languages.

Text Box:
Figure 1-1. Regions of a circle; n = 8.. A typical curriculum suggestion that might be posted on an educational resources listing on the Internet is the problem of regions of a circle: Given n points on the circumference of a circle, what is the maximum number of regions one can divide the circle into by drawing straight lines connecting the points? (See figure 1-1.) For instance, connecting two points divides the circle into two regions; connecting three points with three lines creates four regions. This is a potentially fascinating problem because its subtleties can be explored at length using just algebra and several varieties of clear thinking.

Figure 1-1 goes approximately here

The problem with this curriculum offering as an Internet posting is that it has not been placed in a rich setting. To be useful, a fuller curriculum providing a set of conceptual tools is needed. For instance, a discussion of inductive reasoning brings out some of the character of this particular problem. If one counts the number of regions, R(n), for n = 1 to 6, one obtains the doubling series: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 31. Almost! One expects the last of these numbers to be 32, but that last region is nowhere to be found. For larger n, the series diverges completely from the powers of 2. Why? Here, inductive reasoning can come to the rescue of the hasty inductive assumption—if, that is, the problem is accompanied by a discussion of inductive reasoning.

Consider the general case of n points. Assume that the answer is known for n-1 points and think about how many new regions are created by adding the n-th point and connecting it to each of the n-1 old points. There is a definite pattern at work here. It may take a couple days of careful thought to work it out. It would also help if the sigma notation for sums of indexed terms is explained as a representational tool for working on the problem. Perhaps a collaborative group effort will be needed to check each step and avoid mistakes.

At this point, a teacher might introduce the notion of recursion and relate it to induction. If the students can program in Logo or Pascal (programming languages that can represent recursive processes), they could put the general formula into a simple but powerful program that could generate results for hundreds of values of n very quickly without the tedious and error-prone process of counting regions in drawings. It would be nice to formalize the derivation of this result with a deductive proof, if the method of formulating proofs has been explained.

Now that students are confident that they have the correct values for many n, they can enter these values in a spreadsheet to explore them. The first representation they might want to see is a graph of R(n) vs. n. On the spreadsheet they could make a column that displays the difference between each R(n) and its corresponding R(n-1). Copying this column several times, they would find that the fourth column of differences is constant. This result means that R(n) follows a fourth order equation, which can be found by solving simultaneous equations.

Figure 1-2. A number of multimedia resources related to the “regions of a circle” problem. These include textual documents, drawings, equations, spreadsheets, graphs and computer program source code.

The point of this example is that sharing the isolated statement of the problem is not enough. The rich learning experience involves being introduced to alternative representations of the problem: induction, recursion, spreadsheet differences, graphs, computer languages, simultaneous equations, etc. There is not one correct method for tackling a problem like this; a mathematically literate person needs to be able to view the problem’s many facets through several conceptual frameworks.

A curriculum in the new paradigm typically consists of stimulating problems immersed in environments with richly interacting ecologies, including: cognitive skills, knowledge representations, computational tools, related problems and reference materials. Perhaps a creative teacher with unlimited preparation time could put these materials together. However, the reality is that teachers deserve all the support they can get if they are to prepare and present the complex learning ecologies that constructivist reforms call for. Computer support for curriculum development should make the kinds of resources shown in figure 1-2 readily available.

Figure 1-2 goes approximately here

From Database to Design Environment

Curriculum planning for learning ecologies is not a simple matter of picking consecutive pages out of a standard textbook or of working out a sequential presentation of material that builds up to fixed learning achievements. Rather, it is a matter of design. To support teachers in developing curriculum that achieves this, we must go beyond databases of isolated resources to provide design environments for curriculum development.

It may seem to be an overwhelming task to design an effective learning environment for promoting the development of basic cognitive skills. However, dozens of reform curricula have already been created. The problem now is to disseminate these in ways that allow teachers to adapt them to their local needs and to reuse them as templates for additional new curricula. It is instructive to look at a recent attempt to make this type of curriculum available. The “MathFinder CD-ROM: a collection of resources for mathematics reform” excerpts materials from thirty new math curricula (Kreindler & Zahm, 1992). Like the posting of curriculum ideas at several Internet sites, this is an important early step at electronic dissemination.

Unfortunately, MathFinder has a number of serious limitations due to its CD-ROM (read-only) format. It relies on a fixed database of resources that allows resources to be located but not expanded or revised. Its indexing is relatively simple¾primarily oriented toward illustrating a particular set of math standards¾yet its search mechanism is cumbersome for many teachers. Because its resources are stored in bitmap images, they cannot be adapted in any way by teachers or students. Moreover, MathFinder provides no facility for organizing resources into curricula¾despite the fact that most of the resources it includes are excerpted from carefully constructed curricula. Because it is sold as a read-only commodity, MathFinder does not allow teachers to share their experiences with annotations or to add their own curricular ideas. Thus, of the five issues listed in the Introduction of this study, MathFinder only provides a partial solution to the issues of location and search.

An alternative approach is suggested by our work on domain-oriented design environments (Fischer et al., 1993; Fischer et al., 1998; Repenning & Sumner, 1995; Stahl, McCall, & Peper, 1992; Stahl, 1993). A software design environment provides a flexible workspace for the construction of artifacts, and places useful design tools and materials close at hand. A design environment for curriculum development goes substantially beyond a database of individual resources. Based on this approach, we built a prototype version of a Teacher’s Curriculum Assistant (TCA). TCA includes a catalog of previously designed curricula that can be reused and modified. It has a gallery of educational resources that can be inserted into partial curriculum designs. There is a workspace, into which curricula from the catalog can be loaded and resources from the gallery inserted. It is also possible for a teacher to specify criteria for the desired curriculum. Specifications are used for searching the case-base of curricula, adapting the resources and critiquing new designs.

TCA allows teachers to download curricular resources from the Internet and to create coherent classroom activities tailored to local circumstances. In particular, TCA addresses the set of five issues identified in the Introduction:

1. TCA is built on a database of information about educational resources posted to the Internet, so it provides a mechanism for teachers to locate sources of curriculum ideas at scattered Internet sites.

2. The TCA database indexes each resource in a uniform way, allowing teachers to search for all items meeting desired conditions.

3. TCA includes tools to help teachers adapt items they find to the needs of their classroom.

4. TCA provides a design workspace for organizing retrieved ideas into lesson plans that build toward long-term goals.

5. TCA lets teachers conveniently share their experiences back through the Internet.

The TCA Prototype

Based on preliminary study of these issues, a TCA prototype has been developed. Six interface screens have been designed for teacher support: Profiler, Explorer, Versions, Editor, Planner, and Networker.

Figure 1-3. The teacher-client software interface for locating, searching and selecting resources and curricula: the Profiler, Explorer and Versions.

The Profiler, Explorer and Versions interfaces work together for information retrieval (figure 1-3). The Profiler helps teachers define classroom profiles and locates curricula and resources that match the profile. The Explorer displays these items and allows the teacher to search through them to find related items. Versions then helps the teacher select from alternative versions that have been adapted by other teachers. Through these interfaces, teachers can locate the available materials that most closely match their personal needs; this makes it easier to tailor the materials to individual requirements.

Figure 1-3 goes approximately here

The Planner, Editor and Networker help the teacher to prepare resources and curricula, and to share the results of classroom use (figure 1-4). The Planner is a design environment for reusing and reorganizing lesson plans. The Editor allows the teacher to modify and adapt resources. This is a primary means of personalizing a curriculum to individual classroom circumstances. Finally, the Networker supports interactions with the Internet, providing a two-way medium of communication with a global community of teachers. Using the Networker, a teacher can share personalized versions of standard curricula with other teachers who might have similar needs.

Figure 1-4. The teacher-client interface for adapting, organizing and sharing resources and curricula: the Planner, Editor and Networker.

Figure 1-4 goes approximately here

To illustrate how TCA works, each of the five issues will be discussed in the following sections. These sections present a scenario of a teacher using TCA to locate resources, search through them, adapt selected resources, organize them into a curriculum and share the results with other teachers.

Scenario Step 1: Locating Curriculum

Imagine a high school mathematics teacher using TCA. In the coming year she has to introduce some geometric concepts like Pythagoras’ Theorem and deductive proofs. More generally, she might want to discuss the ubiquity of patterns and ways to represent them mathematically. TCA lets her browse for semester themes and their constituent weekly units and lesson plans related to these topics.

TCA distinguishes four levels of curricula available on the Internet:

· A theme is a major curriculum, possibly covering a semester or a year of school and optionally integrating several subjects. A theme consists of multiple teaching units.

· A weekly unit is part of a theme, typically one week of lessons for a single subject. A unit is described by its constituent daily lesson plans.

· A plan is one day’s lesson for a class. A lesson plan might include a number of resources, such as a lecture, a reading, an exercise or project, and perhaps a quiz and a homework assignment.

· A resource is an element of a lesson plan. It might be a text, available as a word processing document. It could also be a video clip, a spreadsheet worksheet, a graphic design or a software simulation. Resources are the smallest units of curricula indexed by TCA.

TCA lets the teacher locate relevant curricula by analyzing information stored on her computer about items available on the Internet. Along with the TCA software on her computer there is a case-base of summaries (indexes) of curricula and resources that can be downloaded. These summary records reference curricula and resources that have been posted to Internet nodes around the world. In addition to containing the Internet address information needed for downloading an item, a record contains a description of the item, so that the teacher can decide whether or not it is of interest.

After a set of interesting items has been selected based on the information in the case-base, TCA downloads the items to the teacher’s computer. This happens without her having to know where they were located or how to download them. The items are then available for modification, printing or distribution to her students. If Internet traffic is slow, she may opt to download batches of curriculum and resources overnight and then work with them the next day.[1]

Scenario Step 2: Searching for Resources

TCA provides a combination of query and browsing mechanisms to help a teacher select curricula of interest and to find resources that go with it. She can start in the Profiler (Figure 3) by specifying that she wants a curriculum for ninth grade mathematics. Then she can browse through a list of themes in the Explorer that meet the specification. If the list is too long, she can narrow down her search criteria.

The theme named “A Look at the Greek Mind” is summarized as: “This is an integrated curriculum that explores myth, patterns and abstract reasoning.” It emphasizes patterns and is likely to include Pythagoras’ theorem. The teacher can click on this theme in the list. Her computer now displays summaries of the units that make up the curriculum for that theme. This list shows three weekly units. Select week 1, described as “Abstract thinking: number theory and deductive reasoning.”

She now sees summaries of that week’s five daily lesson plans. She looks at the geometry example for day 3, “Inductive reasoning example: regions of a circle.” She select that one and the screen changes to show the lesson plan in the Planner (Figure 4). It lists all the resources suggested for that period: two lecture topics, a class exercise, several alternative activities for small groups and a homework assignment.

The screenshot of Explorer illustrates how a teacher can browse from a given resource, like “chart of regions on a circle” up to all the lesson plans, units and themes that include that resource and then back down to all the associated units, plans and resources. This is one way to locate related resources within curricular contexts. The teacher can also turn to the Versions component to find variations on a particular resource and comments about the resource and its different versions by teachers who have used it.

Notice resource #2 in the Planner, where students create a spreadsheet chart: “Group activity: Chart of ratios on a circle.” When the teacher selects it with the mouse, the Editor shows the detail for that resource, including its index values.

The description contained in the case-base for each posted resource is organized as a set of 24 indexes and annotations, such as: recommended grade level, content area, pedagogical goal, instructional mode, prerequisites, materials used, required time and the like. Note that total class time and homework time are computed and teacher preparations for the resources are listed below the workspace.

The TCA Profiler allows a teacher to specify her curricular needs using combinations of these indexes. Resources are also cross referenced so that she can retrieve many different resources that are related to a given one. Thus, once she has found the “problem of regions of a circle”, she can easily locate discussions of inductive reasoning, formal proofs, recursion, simultaneous equations, sample programs in Logo or Pascal, spreadsheet templates for analyzing successive differences and graphing tools. She can also find week-long units that build on geometric problems like this one, with variations for students with different backgrounds, learning styles or interests. TCA allows her to search both top-down from themes to resources and bottom-up from resources to curricula.

Scenario Step 3: Adapting to Local Needs

Adaptation tools are available in TCA for resources that have been downloaded from the Internet. The Planner component provides a design workspace for assembling a custom lesson plan and the Editor helps a teacher to adapt individual resources to her local needs. The TCA system can often make automated suggestions for adapting a resource to the specification given in the search process. For instance, if she retrieves a resource that was targeted for 11th grade when she is looking for 10th grade material, then TCA might suggest allowing her students more time to do the tasks or might provide more supporting and explanatory materials for them. In general, she will need to make the adaptations; even where the software comes up with suggestions, she must use her judgment to make the final decision.

While TCA can automate some adaptation, most tailoring of curricula requires hands-on control by an experienced teacher. Sometimes TCA can support her efforts by displaying useful information. For instance, if she is adapting resources organized by national standards to local standards she might like her computer to display both sets of standards and to associate each local standard with corresponding national standards. In other situations, perhaps involving students whose first language is not English, TCA might link a resource requiring a high level of language understanding to a supplementary visual presentation.

The adaptation process relies on alternative versions of individual resources being posted. The TCA VERSIONS component helps a teacher adjust to different student groups, teaching methods and time constraints by retrieving alternative versions of resources that provide different motivations, use different formats or go into more depth. She can substitute these alternative resources into lesson plans; they can then be modified with multimedia editing software from within TCA.

Included in the Editor is a reduced image of the spreadsheet itself. If a teacher click on this image, TCA brings up the commercial software application in which the document was produced. So she can now edit and modify the copy of this document which appears on her screen. She need not leave TCA to do this. Then she can print out her revised version for her students or distribute it directly to their computers. In this way, she can use her own ideas or those of her students to modify and enhance curricular units found on the Internet.

Just as it is important for teachers to adapt curricula to their needs, it is desirable to have resources that students can tailor. Current software technology makes this possible, as illustrated by a number of simulations in the Agentsheets Exploratorium (Ambach, Perrone, & Reppening, 1995; Stahl, Sumner, & Repenning, 1995).

Scenario Step 4: Organizing Resources into Lesson Plans

The lesson plan is a popular representation for a curriculum. It provides teachers a system for organizing classroom activities. TCA uses the lesson plan metaphor as the basis for its design workspace. A teacher can start her planning by looking at downloaded lesson plans and then modifying them to meet her local needs.

The TCA Planner workspace for designing lesson plans was shown in Figure 4. In addition to summaries of each resource, the workspace lists the time required by each resource, both in class and at home. These times are totaled at the bottom of the list of resources in the Planner. This provides an indication of whether there is too much or too little instructional material to fill the period. The teacher can then decide to add or eliminate resources or adjust their time allowances. The total homework time can be compared to local requirements concerning homework amounts.

TCA incorporates computational critics (Fischer et al., 1993; Fischer et al., 1998). Critics are software rules that monitor the curriculum being constructed and verify that specified conditions are maintained. For instance, critics might automatically alert the teacher if the time required for a one-day curriculum exceeds or falls short of the time available.

Scenario Step 5: Sharing New Experiences

Once a teacher has developed curricula and used them successfully in the classroom, she may want to share her creations with other teachers. This way, the pool of ideas on the Internet will grow and mature. TCA has facilities for her to annotate individual resources and curricular units at all levels with descriptions of how they worked in her classroom. This is part of the indexing of the resource or unit.

Assume that a teacher downloaded and used the “regions of a circle” resource and modified it based on her classroom experience. Now she wants to upload her version back to the Internet. The TCA Networker component automates that process, posting the new resource to an available server and adding the indexes for it to the server used for distributing new indexes. Because the indexing of her revision would be similar to that of the original version of the resource, other teachers looking at the “regions of a circle” resource would also find her version with her comments. In this way, the Internet pool of resources serves as a medium of communication among teachers about the specific resources. It is in such ways that I hope the use of the Internet for curriculum development will go far beyond today’s first steps.

What I Have Learned

I conceptualize the understanding I have reached through my work on TCA in five principles:

1. Most resources should be located at distributed sites across the Internet, but carefully structured summaries (indexes) of them should be maintained on teachers’ local computers or in centralized catalogs.

2. The search process should be supported through a combination of query and browsing tools that help teachers explore what is available.

3. Adaptation of tools and resources to teachers and students is critical for developing and benefiting from constructivist curriculum.

4. Resources must be organized into carefully designed curriculum units to provide effective learning environments.

5. The Internet should become a medium for sharing curriculum ideas, not just accessing them.

A system to assist teachers in developing curricula for educational reform has been designed and prototyped. All aspects of the system must now be refined by working further with classroom teachers and curriculum developers. While the approach of TCA appeals to teachers who have participated in its design, its implementation must still be tuned to the realities of the classroom.

The distribution of resources and indexes prototyped in TCA has attractive advantages. Because the actual multimedia resources (text, pictures, video clips, spreadsheet templates, HyperCard stacks, software applications) are distributed across the Internet, there is no limit to the quantity or size of these resources and no need for teachers to have large computers. Resources can be posted on network servers maintained by school districts, regional educational organizations, textbook manufacturers and other agencies. Then the originating agency can maintain and revise the resources as necessary.

However, the approach advocated here faces a major institutional challenge: the standardization of resource indexing. The difficulty with this approach is the need to index every resource and to distribute these indexes to every computer that runs TCA. This involves (a) implementing a distribution and updating system for the case-base index records and (b) establishing the TCA indexing scheme as a standard.

The distribution and updating of indexes can be handled by tools within TCA and support software for major curriculum contributors. However, the standardization requires coordination among interested parties. Before any teachers can use TCA there must be useful indexed resources available on the network, with comprehensive suggested lesson plans. It is necessary to establish cooperation among federally-funded curriculum development efforts, textbook publishers, software publishers and school districts. If successful, this will establish a critical mass of curriculum on the Internet accessible by TCA. Then the Internet can begin to be an effective medium for the global sharing of locally adaptable curriculum.

Evolving a Learning Environment

Chapter 2 offers another fairly typical attempt to use the power of computer technology to support learning. Students need iterative practice with timely expert feedback for developing many skills, but computer-based drill and practice is not easy to implement in ways that are fun to use and educationally effective when the task involves interpreting semantics of free text. The State the Essence software used latent semantic analysis (LSA) to solve this problem. It shows how a computer can provide a partial mentoring function, relieving teachers of some of the tedium while increasing personalized feedback to students.

The software evolved through a complex interplay with its user community during classroom testing to provide effective automated feedback to students learning to summarize short texts. It demonstrates the collaboration among researchers, teachers and students in developing educational innovations. It also suggests collaborative group use of such software.

This case study is interesting not only for describing software design, implementation and adoption within a social context involving researchers, teachers and students, but also for its assessment of LSA, which is often proposed as a panacea for automated natural language understanding in CSCW and CSCL systems. It is an idea that at first appears simple and powerful, but turns out to require significant fine-tuning and a very restricted application. Success also depends upon integration into a larger activity context in which the educational issues have been carefully taken into account. In this case, well-defined summarization skills of individual students are fairly well understood, making success possible.

Interactive learning environments promise to significantly enrich the experience of students in classrooms by allowing them to explore information under their own intrinsic motivation and to use what they discover to construct knowledge in their own words. To date, a major limitation of educational technology in pursuing this vision has been the inability of computer software to interpret unconstrained free text by students in order to interact with students without limiting their behavior and expression.

In a project at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Cognitive Science, a research group I worked in developed a system named State the Essence that provides feedback to students on summaries that they compose in their own words from their understanding of assigned instructional texts. This feedback encourages the students to revise their summaries through many drafts, to reflect on the summarization process, to think more carefully about the subject matter, and to improve their summaries prior to handing them in to the teacher. Our software uses a technology called latent semantic analysis (LSA) to compare the student summary to the original text without having to solve the more general problem of computer interpretation of free text.

LSA has frequently been described from a mathematical perspective and the results of empirical studies of its validity are widely available in the psychological literature.[2] This report on our experience with State the Essence is not meant to duplicate those other sources, but to convey a fairly detailed sense of what is involved in adapting LSA for use in interactive learning environments. To do this I describe how our software evolved through a two-year development and testing period.

In this chapter I explain how our LSA-based environment works. There is no magic here. LSA is a statistical method that has been developed by tuning a numeric representation of word meanings to human judgments. Similarly, State the Essence is the result of adapting computational and interface techniques to the performance of students in the classroom. Accordingly, this chapter presents an evolutionary view of the machinery we use to encourage students to evolve their own articulations of the material they are reading.

Section 1 of this chapter discusses the goals and background of our work. Section 2 takes a look at our interactive learning environment from the student perspective: the evolving student-computer interface. A central section 3 “lifts the hood” to see the multiple ways in which LSA is used to assess a student summary and formulate feedback. This raises questions about how LSA’s semantic representation contained in our software itself evolved to the point where it can support decisions comparable to human judgments; these questions are addressed in the concluding section 4, which also summarizes our process of software design in use as a co-evolution, and suggests directions for continuing development.

1. Evolution of Student Articulations

Educational theory emphasizes the importance of students constructing their own understanding in their own terms. Yet most schooling software that provides automatic feedback to the students requires students to memorize and repeat exact wordings. Whereas the new educational standards call for developing the ability of students to engage in high-level critical thinking involving skills such as interpretation and argumentation, current software tools to tutor and test students still look for the correct answer to be given by a particular keyword. In the attempt to assess learning more extensively without further over-burdening the teachers, schools increasingly rely upon computer scoring, typically involving multiple choice or single word answers. While this may be appropriate under certain conditions, it fails to assess more open-ended communication and reflection skills—and may deliver the wrong implicit message about what kind of learning is important. Because we are committed to encouraging learners to be articulate, we have tried to overcome this limitation of computer support.

The underlying technical issue involves, of course, the inability of computer software to understand normal human language. While it is simple for a program to decide if a multiple choice selection or a word entered by a student matches an option or keyword stored in the program as the correct answer, it is in general not possible for software to decide if a paragraph of English is articulating a particular idea. This is known as the problem of “natural language understanding” in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). While some researchers have been predicting since the advent of computers that the solution to this problem is just around the corner (Turing, 1950), others have argued that the problem is in principle unsolvable (Dreyfus, 1972; Searle, 1980).

The software technique we call latent semantic analysis (LSA) promises a way to finesse the problem of natural language understanding in many situations. LSA has proven to be almost as good as human graders in judging the similarity of meaning of two school-related texts in English in a number of restricted contexts. Thus, we can use LSA to compare a student text to a standard text for semantic similarity without having to interpret the meaning of either text explicitly.

The technique underlying LSA was originally developed in response to the “vocabulary problem” in information retrieval (Furnas et al., 1987). The retrieval problem arises whenever information may be indexed using different terms that mean roughly the same thing. When one does a search using one term, it would be advantageous to retrieve the information indexed by that term’s synonyms as well. LSA maintains a representation of what words are similar in meaning to each other, so it can retrieve information that is about a given topic regardless of which related index terms were used. The representation of what words are similar in meaning may be extended to determine what texts (sentences, paragraphs, essays) are similar in topic. The way that LSA does all this should become gradually clearer as this chapter unfolds.

Because LSA has often proven to be effective in judging the similarity in meaning between texts, it occurred to us that it could be used for judging student summaries. The idea seemed startlingly simple: Submit two texts to LSA—an original essay and a student attempt to summarize that essay. The LSA software returns a number whose magnitude represents how “close” the two texts are semantically (how much they express what humans would judge as similar meanings). All that was needed was to incorporate this technique in a motivational format where the number is displayed as a score. Students would see the score and try to revise their summaries to increase their scores.

In 1996, we (see Notes at end of book) were a group of cognitive scientists who had been funded to develop educational applications of LSA to support articulate learners. We were working with a team of two teachers at a local middle school. We recognized that summarization skills were an important aspect of learning to be articulate and discovered that the teachers were already teaching these skills as a formal part of their curriculum. We spent the next two years trying to implement and assess this simple sounding idea. We initially called our application “State the Essence” to indicate the central goal of summarization.

A companion paper (Kintsch et al., 2000) reports on the learning outcomes of middle school students using our software during two years of experimentation. Here I will just give one preliminary result of a more recent experiment I conducted informally, namely, to indicate the potential of this approach in a different context: collaborative learning at the college level. This experiment was conducted in an undergraduate computer science course on AI. The instructor wanted to give the students a hands-on feel for LSA so we held a class in a computer lab with access to State the Essence. Prior to class, the students were given a lengthy scholarly paper about LSA (Landauer, Foltz, & Laham, 1998) and were asked to submit summaries of two major sections of the paper as homework assignments. Once in the lab, students worked both individually and in small teams. First they submitted their homework summary to State the Essence, and then revised it for about half an hour. The students who worked on part I individually worked on part II in groups for the second half hour, and vice versa.

Of course, I cannot compare the number of drafts done on-line with the original homework summaries because the latter were done without feedback and presumably without successive drafts. Nor have I assessed summary quality or student time-on-task. However, informal observation during the experiment suggests that engagement with the software maintained student focus on revising the summaries, particularly in the collaborative condition. In writing summaries of part I, collaborative groups submitted 71% more drafts than individual students—an average of 12 compared to 7. In part II (which was more difficult and was done when the students had more experience with the system) collaborative groups submitted 38% more drafts—an average of 22 drafts as opposed to 16 by individuals. Interaction with the software in the collaborative groups prompted stimulating discussions about the summarization process and ways of improving the final draft—as well as the impressive number of revisions. Computer support of collaboration opens up a new dimension for the evolution of student articulations beyond what we have focused on in our research to date. It would be important to develop interface features, feedback mechanisms and communication supports for collaboration to exploit the potential of collaborative learning.

2. Evolution of the Student-Computer Interface

What did the students view on the computer screen that was so motivating that they kept revising their summaries? The companion paper discusses in detail our shifting rationale for the design of the State the Essence interface. However, it may be useful to show here what the screen looked like after a summary draft was submitted. In the first year of our testing we built up a fairly elaborate display of feedback. Figure 2-1 shows a sample of the basic feedback.

Figure 2-1 goes approximately here

Note that the main feedback concerns topic coverage. The original text was divided into five sections with headings. The feedback indicates which sections the students’ summaries cover adequately or inadequately. A link points to the text section that needs the most work. Other indications show which sentences are considered irrelevant (off topic for all sections), and which are redundant (repeating content covered in other sentences of the student summary). In addition, spelling problems are noted. Finally, warnings are given if the summary is too long or too short. The focus of the feedback is an overall score, with a goal of getting 10 points.

The evolution of the interface was driven primarily by the interplay of two factors:

1. Our ideas for providing helpful feedback (see next section).

2. The students’ cognitive ability to take advantage of various forms of feedback (see the companion paper).

We found that there was a thin line between feedback that provides too little help and feedback that is overwhelming. The exact location of this line depends heavily upon such factors as student maturity, level of writing skills, class preparations for summarization tasks, classroom supports, and software presentation styles.

Text Box:
Figure 2-1. View of the early interface showing feedback from a draft summary at the bottom of the screen.

Text Box:
Figure 2-2. View of the later interface showing feedback from a draft summary. For our second year, we simplified the feedback, making

Contents

Series Foreword

Essays on Technology, Interaction and Cognition

Part I. Design of Computer Support for Collaboration

Introduction to Part I: Studies of Technology Design

Chapter 1. Share Globally, Adapt Locally

Chapter 2. Evolving a Learning Environment

Chapter 3. Armchair Missions to Mars

Chapter 4. Supporting Situated Interpretation

Chapter 5. Collaboration Technology for Communities

Chapter 6. Perspectives on Collaborative Learning

Chapter 7. Groupware Goes to School

Chapter 8. Knowledge Negotiation Online

Part II. Analysis of Collaborative Knowledge Building

Introduction to Part II: Studies of Interaction Analysis

Chapter 9. A Model of Collaborative Knowledge Building

Chapter 10. Rediscovering the Collaboration

Chapter 11. Contributions to a Theory of Collaboration

Chapter 12. In a Moment of Collaboration

Chapter 13. Collaborating with Relational References

Part III. Theory of Group Cognition

Introduction to Part III: Studies of Collaboration Theory

Chapter 14. Communicating with Technology

Chapter 15. Building Collaborative Knowing

Chapter 16. Group Meaning / Individual Interpretation

Chapter 17. Shared Meaning, Common Ground, Group Cognition

Chapter 18. Making Group Cognition Visible

Chapter 19. Can Collaborative Groups Think?

Chapter 20. Opening New Worlds for Collaboration

Chapter 21. Thinking at the Small-Group Unit of Analysis

Notes

References

Name Index

Topic Index