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Collaborative Representations: Problems Addressed

The limited comparative research available suggests that the form of representations used by learners during collaborative inquiry can have a significant effect on the discourse of the collaborating learners. In brief, different forms of representations lead to different features of discourse. This effect has been shown for both representations that are constructed by learners during collaboration (Suthers, 1999) and representations used as a medium of discourse (Baker & Lund, 1997; Guzdial, 1997; Wojahn, et al., 1998). Yet such studies sometimes fail to show an effect on learning outcomes (as opposed to processes). Although time on task is a factor, learners may also need more explicit support for their knowledge-building in order for process differences to be translated into outcome differences.

A separate but related line of research on computer mediated communication (CMC) has identified several problems related to typical discourse representations through which people communicate online. These problems include incoherence due to the violation of discourse conventions for topic maintenance (Herring, 1999), and lack of convergence, due to the intrinsically divergent representations used in threaded discussion (Hewitt, 1997). The shared agreement or knowledge being constructed by the discourse is not made explicit by existing tools, and hence it is difficult to find relevant contributions, place one's own contribution in the relevant context, or quickly grasp and assess the outcome of the discourse (Turoff et al., 1999). We need better online support for artifact-centered discourse, discourse that makes reference to and is tightly integrated with visual or textual artifacts.

The fundamental problems are a lack of integration of discourse representations with other representations, and a lack of explicit construction of the desired outcome of the collaboration, leading to weak support for online knowledge-building discourse.

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Baker, M. & Lund, K. (1997). Promoting reflective interactions in a CSCL environment. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 13, 175-193.

Guzdial, M. (1997, December). Information ecology of collaborations in educational settings: Influence of tool. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL '97), (pp. 83-90). Toronto: University of Toronto.

Herring, S.C. (1999, January). Interactive coherence in CMC. In Proceedings of the 32nd Hawai'i International Conference on the System Sciences (HICSS 32). (CD-ROM). Maui, Hawai'i: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE).

Hewitt, J. (1997). Beyond threaded discourse. Paper presented at WebNet'97. Available: http://csile.oise.utoronto.ca/abstracts/ThreadedDiscourse.html

Suthers, D. D. (1999e, December). Effects of alternate representations of evidential relations on collaborative learning discourse. In Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL '99). Stanford University.

Turoff, M., Hiltz, S. R., Bieber, M., Fjermestad, J., & Rana, A. (1999). Collaborative discourse structures in computer mediated group communications. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 4(4). Online: http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/

Wojahn, P.G., Neuwirth, C.M., & Bullock, B. (1998, April). Effects of interfaces for annotation on communication in a collaborative task. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '98), (pp. 456-463). Los Angeles: ACM Press.