While there are many studies on students' collaborative learning at the small group level, pedagogies and strategies for supporting students' collaborative learning at the class level are underexplored. This study proposes a pedagogical model named the Spiral Model of Collaborative Knowledge Improvement (SMCKI) to inform the design and…

This study reports on a novel design methodology, namely, design-centered research (DCR), developed to analyze and evaluate the alignment between an online collaborative learning design and its enactment. The approach is illustrated in a study involving 40 groups in total. Twenty different online collaborative learning activities were designed and…

By adopting a situated and interactional approach, we explore students' immersive VR experiences as resources for collaborative meaning making and learning. We draw on data from a project in which teachers and researchers co-developed a learning design for upper secondary students involving immersive VR technology. In this learning design,…

The use of computational scaffolding is a crucial strategy to foster students' regulation of learning skills, which is associated with increased learning achievement. However, most interventions treat the regulatory processes as individual actions isolated from a social context. This view contradicts the most recent research that points to the…

The theory of Instrumental Genesis (IG) accounts for the mutual evolution of artefacts and their uses, for specific purposes in specific environments. IG has been used in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) to explain how instruments are generated through the interactions of learners, teachers and artefacts in 'downstream' classroom…

Collaboration scripts and heuristic worked examples have been described as powerful scaffolds to support skill acquisition in CSCL. While CSCL scripts particularly facilitate argumentative discourse within groups, heuristic worked examples provide heuristics and worked out pathways to solve domain-specific tasks. Yet, both scripts and heuristic…

Social practices are assumed to play an important role in the evolution of new teaching and learning methods. Teachers internalize knowledge developed in their communities through interactions with peers and experts while solving problems or co-creating materials. However, these social practices and their influence on teachers' adoption of new…

There are many approaches that support studies of learning in relation to the physical environment, people's interaction with one another, or people's movement. However, what these approaches achieve in granularity of description, they tend to lose in synthesis and integration, and to date, there are not effective methods and concepts to study…

The learning sciences of today recognize the tri-dimensional nature of learning as involving cognitive, social and emotional phenomena. However, many computer-supported argumentation systems still fail in addressing the socio-emotional aspects of group reasoning, perhaps due to a lack of an integrated theoretical vision of how these three…

Museum researchers have long acknowledged the importance of dialogue in informal learning, particularly for open-ended exploratory exhibits. Novel interaction techniques like full-body interaction are appealing for these exploratory exhibits, but designers have not had a metric for determining how their designs are supporting productive learning…

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…

Role taking is an established approach for promoting social cognition. Playing a specific role within a group could lead students to exercise collective cognitive responsibility for collaborative knowledge building. Two studies explored the relationship of role taking to participation in a blended university course. Students participated in the…

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…

Although learning science in informal non-school environments has shown great promise in terms of increasing interest and engagement, few studies have systematically investigated and produced evidence of improved conceptual knowledge and cognitive skills. Furthermore, little is known about how digital technologies that are increasingly being used…

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…