Journal of the Learning SciencesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:This article reports on a qualitative study of the construct of shared epistemic agency, investigated in the context of collaborative instructional design activities of university students. The aim of the study is to shed light on the notion of shared epistemic agency and to create empirical grounding for its theoretical description. The current study provides an account of the construct, based on a review of several theoretical conceptualizations and on the analysis of empirical material from 2 case studies from university education. We investigate shared epistemic agency within the specific framework of the knowledge creation perspective on learning, viewing it as the capacity that enables deliberate collaborative efforts of groups to create shared knowledge objects. Our study identifies and describes 2 core dimensions of shared epistemic agency: the epistemic and the regulative dimensions. We identify actions within each dimension that indicate the manifestation of shared epistemic agency in the practice of collaborative creation of shared knowledge objects. This study also distinguishes patterns of action that provide indications of how shared epistemic agency is differently articulated in the 2 groups' collaborative object-oriented activities.

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The current period in the history of mankind has been coined as the knowledge age (Brown & Duguid, 2000; Bereiter, 2002). This term serves to distinguish this period from its predecessor, the information age. In contrast to information, knowledge entails a knower, is hard to detach from its owner, and seems to be something that we digest rather than hold. Knowledge lies less in databases than in people, and has to be disclosed by some form of collective activity, and people have to be learn how be engaged in collaborative activities that produce new knowledge. In professional contexts at least, the people who construct knowledge are called 'knowledge workers', a term that can be associated with slavery, under those who coordinate them, and who need knowledge for economic reasons. Because knowledge does not really have ownership, it can be turned into economic value by anyone that knows how to do it. Whatever the undertone, currently there is a more than humanitarian interest in collaborative learning, especially in forms of collaboration that allow people to display and develop their knowledge.The information age was a label indicating a period characterised by rapid developments in information technology, initially inspired by a naive belief that computers, as storage and retrieval devices, could meet all demands for relevant information, and thereby solve most of our learning problems. Now we know better, but what we still do not fully understand is how to construct knowledge technology (Roschelle & Pea, 2002). On the one hand, we suppose that knowledge is highly situational rather than general, and activity bound rather than a product to hold. This calls for specific solutions in the form of tools that support situational activities. On the other hand, collaboration is still taken as a general skill, so people can do it, or they cannot. This calls for the opposite type of solution: general, and content free tools, that can be implemented in many collaborative situations. For us as scientists, the concept of knowledge worker is interesting, because it requires us to think about how to integrate conceptions about knowledge with those of collaborative work, especially in the context of new technologies, without detaching the activities from the individuals and their situation.

In this paper we present a framework for analysing when and how students engage in a specific form of interactive knowledge elaboration in CSCL environments: broadening and deepening understanding of a space of debate. The framework is termed "Rainbow," as it comprises seven principal analytical categories, to each of which a colour is assigned, thus enabling informal visualisation by the analyst of the extent to which students are engaging in interaction relating to potential achievement of its pedagogical goal. The categories distinguish between activities that are part of the prescribed assignment and activities that are not, and between task-focused and non-task-focused activities. Activities focused on managing the interaction itself are distinguished from argumentative interaction. Notably, an operational definition of what it means to broaden and deepen understanding in this case is also provided here. The functional Rainbow analysis is Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (2007) 2:315-357

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