Nobody wants to use technology to recreate education as it is, yet there is not much to distinguish what goes on in most computer-supported classrooms versus traditional classrooms. Kay (1991) has suggested that the phenomenon of reframing innovations to recreate the familiar is itself commonplace. Thus, one sees all manner of powerful technology (Hypercard, CD-ROM, Lego Logo, and so forth) used to conduct shopworn school activities: copying material from one resource into another (e.g., using Hypercard to assemble sound and visual bites produced by others), and following step-by-step procedures (e.g., creating Lego Logo machines by following steps in a manual). With new technologies, student-generated collages and reproductions appear more inventive and sophisticated-with impressive displays of sound, video, and typography-but from a cognitive perspective, it is not clear what, if any, knowledge content has been processed by the students.In this chapter we offer a suggestion for how to escape the pattern of reinventing the familiar with educational technology. Knowledge-building discourse is at the heart of the superior education that we have in mind. We argue that the classroom needs to foster transformational thought, both on the part of students and teachers, and that the best way to do this is to replace classroom-bred discourse patterns with those having more immediate and natural extensions to the real world; patterns whereby ideas are conceived, responded to, reframed, and set in historical context. Our goal is to create communication systems where the relations between what is said and what is written, between immediate and broader audiences, and between what is created in the here-and-now and archived are intimately related and are natural extensions of school-based activities, much as these processes are intertwined and are natural extensions of activities conducted in scholarly disciplines. Our efforts to create an enabling technology have led to the CSILE project-

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This study examines four months of online discourse of 22 Grade 4 students engaged in efforts to advance their understanding of optics. Their work is part of a school-wide knowledge building initiative, the essence of which is giving students collective responsibility for idea improvement. This goal is supported by software-Knowledge Forum-designed to provide a public and collaborative space for continual improvement of ideas. A new analytic tool-inquiry threads-was developed to analyze the discourse used by these students as they worked in this environment. Data analyses focus on four knowledge building principles: idea improvement; real ideas, authentic problems (involving concrete/empirical and abstract/conceptual artifacts); community knowledge (knowledge constructed for the benefit of the community as a whole); and constructive use of authoritative sources. Results indicate that these young students generated theories and explanation-seeking questions, designed experiments to produce real-world empirical data to support their theories, located and introduced expert resources, revised ideas, and responded to problems and ideas that emerged as community knowledge