Argumentation, Computer Support, and the Educational Context of Confronting Cognitions

Abstract

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.

Peer assessment as collaborative learning: A cognitive perspective

“…Successful engagement in mathematical problem-solving has been demonstrated to depend on self-explanation (Renkl, 1997) and the use of heuristic strategies (Schoenfeld, 1985). When task performance is conducted more interactively, discursive processes such as explaining (Webb, 1989), arguing (Andriessen, Baker, & Suthers, 2003) or questioning (King, 1997) may facilitate high-level cognitive processing. Thus, interactively engaging in a task may be beneficial in terms of evoking higher-order cognitive processes which in turn should be positively related to individual learning outcomes.…”

A dialogic understanding of the relationship between CSCL and teaching thinking skills

“…Often this interest is explicitly linked to the claim that new skills are needed as a result of a historical shift in work and life practices (e.g Bereiter, 2002: Andriessen, et al, 2003. Castells surveys the many developments linked to the advent of electronic networks and concludes that they amount to the emergence of a new form of global social organization which he refers to as the 'Networked Society'.…”

A unified framework for multi-level analysis of distributed learning

“…For example, consider the question of finding which participants are in dialogue with each other. Dialogue is clearly a prerequisite for learning through argumentation, intersubjective meaning-making and group cognition [3,33,35]. A key indicator of the presence of dialogue is what we call a round trip: one participant makes a contribution that is accessed by another participant who then makes a contingent contribution (evidencing uptake) that the first participant then accesses [40].…”