Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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For EARLI members only. Not for onward distribution. Social practices of group cognition 193 the group, analogous to an individual’s stream of consciousness. The referential structure of this flow provides a basis for the group’s experience of intersubjectivity, common ground and a shared world. Our goal in the VMT project is to provide a service to students that will allow them to have a rewarding experience collaborating with their peers in online discussions of mathematics. We can never know exactly what kind of subjective experience they had, let alone predict how they will experience life under conditions that we design for them. Our primary access to information related to their group experiences comes from our chat logs. The logs capture most of what student members see of their group on their computer screens. We can even replay the logs so that we see how they unfolded sequentially in time. Of course, we are not engaged in the interaction the way the participants were and recorded experiences never quite live up to the live version because the engagement is missing. We do test out the environments ourselves and enjoy the experience, but we experience math and collaboration differently to middle- school students. We also interview students and their teachers, but teenagers rarely reveal much of their life to adults. So we try to understand how collaborative experiences are structured as interpersonal interactions. Our focus is not on the individuals as subjective minds, but on the group as constituted by the interactions that take place within the group. During VMT chats, students work on math problems and themes. In solving problems and exploring math worlds or phenomena, the groups construct sequences of mathematical reasoning that are analogous to proofs. Proofs in mathematics have an interesting and subtle structure. One must distinguish: (a) the problem situation; (b) the exploratory search for the solution; (c) the effort to reduce a haphazard solution path to an elegant, formalized proof; (d) the statement of the proof; and (e) the lived experience of following the proof (Livingston, 1986; 1987). Each of these has its own structures and practices. Each necessarily references the others. To engage in mathematics is to become ensnarled in the intricate connections among them. To the extent that these aspects of doing math have been distinguished and theorized, it has been done as though there is simply an individual mathematician at work. There has been virtually no research into how these could be accomplished and experienced collaboratively – despite the fact that talking about math has for some time been seen as a priority in math education. More generally, we investigate how these groups construct and make sense of their shared experience of collaborating online (Stahl, 2007). While answers to many questions in computer- mediated interaction have been formulated largely in terms of individual psychology, questions of collaborative experience require consideration of the group as the unit of analysis. Naturally, groups include individuals as contributors and interpreters of content, but the group interactions have structures and elements of their own that call for special analytic approaches (see section on the group of individuals). When groups work well, they can succeed in accomplishing high- order cognitive tasks – like inquiry, problem- solving, generalization and insight – as a group. We call this group cognition (Stahl, 2006b).
For EARLI members only. 194 G. StahlNot for onward distribution. Problem- solving by groups often takes place through interactions involving multiple people. Key ideas do not simply reflect mental representations of an individual, but arise through interactions in which people and groups respond to each other. Online, the sequentiality of chat messages can become confused without the turn- taking conventions of face- to- face communication. Both participants and analysts must learn how to reconstitute and represent the response structure that drives group interaction. At this level, we analyze a proposal- response pair that is typical in math chats, and look at the referencing patterns that determine chat threading when this pair is successfully completed and when it fails (see section on math proposals). Often, math proposals involve deictic references to math objects. Accomplishing such references without physical gestures can be challenging; they require support from special software functionality (see section on deictic referencing). In the most successful VMT chats, meaning is created at the group unit of analysis rather than by particular individuals or isolated minds. The recognition that collaborative groups constitute themselves interactionally and that their sensemaking takes place at the group unit of analysis has fundamental methodological implications for the study of collaboration. The field of computer- supported collaborative learning (CSCL) was founded a decade ago to pursue the analysis of group meaning- making (Stahl, Koschmann & Suthers, 2006). We view the research described here as a contribution to that CSCL tradition. Research methodology for recording group practices and group cognition The VMT service and its technological infrastructure have been systematically designed as an experimental test- bed for studying group cognition (Stahl, 2010). The chatroom is itself persistent and the drawings and text messaging can be replayed for researchers with their original sequentiality. There is no need to involve videotaping and transcription, with their methodological complexities, in order to capture what takes place and make it available for detailed study. While many things are not captured that may take place for individual participants at their distributed physical locations, most of what enters into the group interactions and is necessary for its analysis is readily available to researchers. For instance, the students know little about each other from outside of the chatroom. Communication cues that are hard to specify in face- to- face communication have been largely excluded from the text- based interaction. In chat settings, participants exchange textual postings. This is the sole visible basis for interaction, communication, mutual understanding and collaborative knowledge- building within a simple chat environment. The VMT chat environment now supplements this with some social awareness features and with a shared whiteboard for drawing geometric figures, but for the moment let us consider a generic chatroom. In addition to the content of the typed postings, their order, sequentiality and timing typically play a significant role in how the postings are
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Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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