Johann Ari Larusson

Wikis to support the “collaborative” part of collaborative learning

Prior research has highlighted the value of using wikis to support learning. This paper makes the case that the wiki has several properties that are particularly amenable for constructing applications that support the “collaborative” part of a variety and range of different time/different place student collaborations. In support of the argument, the paper presents the WikiDesignPlatform (WDP). The WDP supplies a suite of awareness, navigation, communication, transcription, and analysis components that provide additional functionality beyond the standard wiki feature set. Two case studies are presented, which have different coordination, communication, and awareness requirements for the “collaborative” part of the students’ collaborative learning activities. The evidence shows that under both conditions, a prefabricated wiki provides a sufficiently rich intersubjective space that adequately supports the students’ collaborative work.

Participation and common knowledge in a case study of student blogging

The interaction between participation and the emergence of common knowledge is the subject matter of this paper. A case study of a single class provides the focal point of analysis. During the semester the students participated in a blogging activity. As a result of their participation, the students create and distribute knowledge. The online efforts of the students can be described as participation in both a discourse and knowledge community. At one level, blogging is an activity composed of writing, reading, and commenting, and at a second level, the students share their thoughts in their own voices. At a third level, over the course of the semester, the student posts and commentary form a commons of information that can be mined later in the semester for other kinds of learning activities. Knowledge creation, distribution, and accumulation are analyzed in terms of student participation at both the level of individual events and from the perspective of an ongoing community.

Tracking Online Collaborative Work as Representational Practice: Analysis and Tool

Online communities of practice are social entities comprised of users who have overlapping or shared goals and interests. Technology that supports activity within an online community of practice takes several forms, ranging from alternate channels of communication, to the virtual meeting rooms, to wiki-based methods for sharing documents. The evaluation of the role of technology, and its design, in the productivity of online communities of practice is a significant and necessary step to engineering better environments for online collaboration.

Technology in a context: enabling students to collaboratively participate at the interface of computation and social science

This paper explores the use of reflective collaborative technology to organize the collaboration within a class so as to produce computer science students who learn to develop technology within a critical framework. A case study is presented that shows how technology can be used to produce objects of reflection and analysis for the multi-disciplinary theoretical analysis of online activity.