Research on computer-supported collaborative learning faces the challenge of extending student collaboration to higher social levels and enabling cross-boundary interaction. This study investigated collaborative knowledge building among four Grade 5 classroom communities that studied human body systems with the support of Idea Thread Mapper (ITM).…

Teachers play a major role during CSCL by monitoring and stimulating the types of interactions between students that are conducive to learning. Teacher dashboards are increasingly being developed to aid teachers in monitoring students' collaborative activities, thereby constituting a form of indirect support for CSCL in the classroom. However, the…

Learning scientists and the CSCL community have argued that knowledge construction is a process of collective thinking; a process that is simultaneously personal and social that requires group cognition. However, while CSCL researchers have investigated situated knowledge in the process of collective thinking, little work has been done to fully…

Despite many years of research in CSCL, computers are still scarcely used in classrooms today. One reason for this is that the constraints of the classroom environment are neglected by designers. In this contribution, we present a CSCL environment designed for a classroom usage from the start. The system, called TapaCarp, is based on a tangible…

Computer-supported collaborative learning has an unexploited potential of becoming an effective learning method for pupils with intellectual disabilities. This paper aims at showing how some specific requirements of this target group may be met by structuring a learning situation with the help of "floor control," which restricts the opportunities…

Developing shared understanding is essential to productive collaboration where a product is jointly constructed. This is especially true when the different collaborators' contributions need to build coherently on one another, as, for example, when making a story together. This study investigated whether encouraging children to engage in discussion…

Interactive tabletops are gaining increased attention from CSCL researchers. This paper analyses the relation between this technology and teaching and learning processes. At a global level, one could argue that tabletops convey a socio-constructivist flavor: they support small teams that solve problems by exploring multiple solutions. The…

This article reviews the research and evidence about multi-touch tables to provide an analysis of their key design features and capabilities and how these might relate to their use in educational settings to support collaborative learning. A typology of design features is proposed as a synthesis of the hardware and physical characteristics of the…

In this paper, we use the concept of chronotope to analyse the co-construction of spatial and temporal frameworks during collaborative interaction. A chronotope is a genre of movement or pacing in the space that participants adopt over the temporal duration of an activity. We look in particular at the conjunction point of time and space as…

The purpose of this article is to gain knowledge about how interactions in a gaming context become constituted as effective resources for a student's learning trajectory. In addition, this detailed study of a learning trajectory documents how a computer game becomes a learning resource for working on a specific topic in school. The article reports…

Collaborative technologies offer a range of new ways of supporting learning by enabling learners to share and exchange both ideas and their own digital products. This paper considers how best to exploit these opportunities from the perspective of learners' needs. New technologies invariably excite a creative explosion of new ideas for ways of…

The present study has explored how pairs of students deployed digital tools (spelling software) as resources in spontaneously occurring corrections of spelling errors. Drawing on the sociocultural theory of learning and ethnomethodological (Conversation Analytic) insights into social interaction, it has identified a range of consistent practices…

Although temporality is a key characteristic of the core concepts of CSCL--interaction, communication, learning, knowledge building, technology use--and although CSCL researchers have privileged access to process data, the theoretical constructs and methods employed in research practice frequently neglect to make full use of information relating…

This article takes a renewed look at the concept of "affordance." It points out that the concept is being used within the CSCL community in ways which signify an underlying disagreement concerning the exact ontological nature and epistemological status of an "affordance." Such disagreement, it is argued, is a problem for both design and empirical…

In upper tertiary educational programmes around the world, the new Web-mediated communication practices termed Web 2.0 are introduced as learning activities with the goal of facilitating learning through collaborative knowledge construction. The aim of this paper is to point to discrepancies in the views of learning, knowledge, and the goals of…