Abstracts - Earli

understanding socially situated practices, it is still possible, to preserve the pedagogic aim ofteaching for higher order thinking and learning skills, as a way to improve the quality of sociallearning and to design technology enhanced learning environments to promote these skills. Firstwe argue for a re-conceptualisation of higher order thinking and learning skills as primarily aproperty of dialogues within networks elaborating on the importance of ‘creative dialogicreflection’ as the highest of higher order thinking skills and the importance of ‘social metacognitiveawareness’ which enables participants in dialogues to scaffold their own and otherslearning and thinking. We then illustrate the value of this theoretical perspective for technologyenhanced pedagogy through three studies of the design and evaluation of tools that both openspaces for dialogic reflection and facilitate the emergence of social meta-cognition.Pedagogical principles in education for critical thinking based on CSCL toolsBaruch Schwarz, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, IsraelMany programs have been developed to foster critical reasoning in classrooms. The ontologicalshift that moved reasoning from an individual cognitive activity to a participatory activity, and thedevelopment of new technological tools that make explicit processes and products, brought newhopes and new challenges in education to critical reasoning. Through the description of effortsdone by our team to use CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) tools to fostercritical reasoning and argumentation, we list several principles concerning the new role that theteacher plays or should play in this endeavor. We will show that the teacher should mediate andorchestrate various argumentative practices and that particular emphasis should be put ontransitions between argumentative activities on the same topic with different motives and onethical aspects of communicationSocio-cognitive tension and relaxation: an analysis of the maintenance of a collaborative workingrelation in multi-channel computer-supported problem-solvingJerry Andriessen, University of Utrecht, NetherlandsMichael Baker, CNRS & University Paris X, FranceWhen people work together — for example in order to plan a holiday, make a meal, fix a car orsolve a maths homework problem — they not only have to contribute to achieving the task at hand(e.g. by proposing a holiday destination, asking for the food mixer or checking a calculation) andto regulate their joint activity ("don’t propose too many destinations at once", "could you stand tothe right", "let me do this part of the calculation"), but they also have to maintain what we term acollaborative working relationship [CWR] (van de Puil & Andriessen, 2005). If people perceivethat their contribution (or their own person) is not appreciated, for example, then they willprogressively or abruptly withdraw from the collaboration; conversely, if the interaction moves toomuch towards the pleasure felt in being together, perhaps the job will not get done. Maintainingcollaboration requires maintaining an appropriate CWR. And all this is of course true whenstudents collaborate in problem solving. Our conception of the CWR comes close to what Crook(1994) has termed the "collaborative experience of learning" [our italics].Pictorial knowledge representations and technology tools for regulating collaborative learningPiia Naykki, University of Oulu, FinlandSanna Järvelä, University of Oulu, FinlandThe aim of this study is to explore how pictorial knowledge representations can supportcollaborative knowledge construction and regulation of collaboration. Prior studies of– 528 –