Emerging and scripted roles in computer-supported collaborative learning

Emerging and scripted roles pose an intriguing approach to analysing and facilitating CSCL. The concept of emerging roles provides a perspective on how learners structure and self-regulate their CSCL processes. Emerging roles appear to be dynamic over longer periods of time in relation to learners’ advancing knowledge, but are often unequally distributed in ad hoc CSCL settings, e.g. a learner being the ‘typist’ and another being the ‘thinker’. Empirical findings show that learners benefit from structuring or scripting CSCL. Scripts can specify roles and facilitate role rotation for learners to equally engage in relevant learning roles and activities. Scripted roles can, however, collide with emerging roles and therefore need to be carefully attuned to the advancing capabilities of the learners

Editorial - Introduction to the special issue on deliberation with computers: exploring the distinctive contribution of new technologies to collaborative thinking and learning

Abstract not available

Knowledge convergence in collaborative learning

In collaborative learning the question has been raised as to how learners in small groups influence one another and converge or diverge with respect to knowledge. Knowledge convergence can be conceptualised as knowledge equivalence and as shared knowledge prior to, during, and subsequent to collaborative learning. Knowledge equivalence refers to learners becoming more similar to their learning partners with regard to the extent of their individual knowledge. Shared knowledge means that learners have knowledge on the very same concepts as their learning partners. In this article, we provide measures for assessing both, knowledge equivalence and shared knowledge

Collaborative design : managing task interdependencies and multiple perspectives

This paper focuses on two characteristics of collaborative design with respect to cooperative work: the importance of work interdependencies linked to the nature of design problems; and the fundamental function of design cooperative work arrangement which is the confrontation and combination of perspectives. These two intrinsic characteristics of the design work stress specific cooperative processes: coordination processes in order to manage task interdependencies, establishment of common ground and negotiation mechanisms in order to manage the integration of multiple perspectives in design

Improvable objects and attached dialogue: new literacy practices employed by learners to build knowledge together in asynchronous settings

Asynchronous online dialogue offers advantages to learners, but has appeared to involve only limited use of new literacy practices. To investigate this, a multimodal approach was applied to asynchronous dialogue. The study analysed the online discussions of small groups of university students as they developed collaboratively authored documents. Sociocultural discourse analysis of the dialogue was combined with visual analysis of its structural elements. The groups were found to employ new literacies that supported the joint construction of knowledge. The documents on which they worked together functioned as ‘improvable objects’ and the development of these was associated with engagement in ‘attached dialogue’. By investigating a wider range of conference dialogue than has previously been explored, it was found that engaging in attached dialogue associated with collaborative authorship of improvable objects prompts groups of online learners to share knowledge, challenge ideas, justify opinions, evaluate evidence and consider options

Supporting collaborative information retrieval in the virtual library

The advent of the virtual library is usually presented as a welcome development for library users. Unfortunately, this tends to reinforce the perception of the use of information resources as a solitary activity. In fact, as many studies have emphasised, information retrieval (IR) in the conventional library is often a highly collaborative activity, involving users' peers and experts such as librarians. Failure to take this into account in the design of virtual library services may result in its users being disadvantaged and denied timely and effective access to sources of assistance. Our focus here is on collaboration between users and librarians. We report an investigation of collaboration issues as seen from the perspective of librarians' and users' contexts and encapsulated in the notion of genre. Finally, we describe the design of a pilot multimedia-based system intended to support collaboration between librarians and IR system users

Informal Online Decision Making: Current Practices and Support System Design

Existing group decision support systems are too complex to support lightweight, informal decision making made popular by the amount of information available on the Web. From an examination of related work, an online survey and a formative study to examine how people currently use the Web for decision support, we present a set of design recommendations towards the development of an informal Web decision support tool

On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet

Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed workflow environment