Implementing Computing Supported Cooperative Learning

A Habermasian perspective on joint meaning making online: What does it offer and what are the difficulties?

“…Garrison, 2007); the practice of peer assessment (e.g. McConnell, 2000) etc. Less ambitiously, collaboration and sharing of perspectives are also seen as providing opportunities for individual learning in the context of community participation (e.g.…”

“…Online interaction seemed to create new patterns of turn taking and to overcome the dominance of particular individuals. The archiving of messages was seen as allowing for more reflective argumentation and a 'rhythm', which better supported deliberative consensus (see, for example, Anderson, 2004;Boyd, 1996;Cecez-Kecmanovic & Webb, 2000;Harasim, 2000;Mason & Kaye, 1989;McConnell, 2000). There were features of online environments, for example a removed audience and an absence of immediate feedback, which could lead to lessened inhibition but these could also support intimacy and group bonding as, for example Barak, Boniel-Nissim & Suler (2008) argue in the context of online support groups.…”

“…On one hand having a tutor might introduce too high a degree of asymmetry within groups, after all a tutor has a power and prestige denied to others (see McConnell, 2000). On the other hand, the tutor might help maintain a sense of reciprocity by, for example, identifying asymmetries and patterns of deference; reminding participants that all points of view need to be considered; and modelling a reflexivity which might be new for some and difficult to embrace.…”

The Challenges of Creating Successful Collaborative Working and Learning Activities in Online Engineering Courses

“…This kind of collaborative working is commonplace in engineering and science workplaces, and in the 1990s gave rise to the Computer-Supported Collaborative Working (CSCW) movement [6], which has developed a wide range of tools and practices to support CSCW. The Computer-Supported Cooperative Learning (CSCL) movement [7] grew up alongside CSCW, with a focus on how learning took place in online working teams, and in more recent years this has morphed into Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning [8]. However, the existence and history of these movements, combined with the tools and practices they have developed, does not in itself address the issue of motivating students to undertake collaborative, group-based activities, in either faceto-face or online learning.…”

Do You See What I Mean? Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis

“…A review of the research literature shows that reports centre on relatively high rates of student participation with evidence of two fundamental facets of social constructivism: co-operative learning (Aviv, Erlich, Ravid, & Geva, 2003;Hawkey, 2003;Hiltz, Coppola, Rotter, & Turoff, 2000), and higher order thinking and knowledge building (Curtis & Lawson, 2001;McConnell, 2000;Thomas, 2002). However, analysis of participation rates and evidence of co-construction of knowledge based on quantitative data from learning management systems have misconstrued the issue slightly.…”