Grounding interaction in a CSCL environment

1. Focus and research question The context for the study is the Gene-Ethics Scenario: an ICT-mediated collaborative learning scenario for natural science education involving two geographically distributed junior high schools. This thesis investigates how technology transforms basic features of students’ communication and collaboration in a telelearning scenario. In particular, my objective is to explore students’ grounding interactions when collaborating in the Future Learning Environment (FLE3). The construction of a mutual understanding sufficient for the current purpose (grounding) is considered a basic process in collaborative learning. The research question I ask is: How does the FLE3 knowledge building forum support or constrain grounding interactions? 2. Methodology and data sources When studying grounding processes at the activity level and utterance level I combine a sociocultural perspective with a micro-analytic approach. Relying on multiple sources of evidence, case study serves as a general research strategy. Prior to a more detailed analysis of students’ grounding interactions at the utterance level, the case is described chronologically according to the progressive inquiry model that is the knowledge building platform of the scenario. The principle data sources are electronic logs, video recordings and scenario documents. 3. Conclusions Students’ grounding acts are divided into two distinct situations according to the qualitative nature of their collaborative interaction as co-located (face-to-face) or distributed (on distance). In the co-located situation, students grounding process progressed relatively unrestricted. The study concludes that the text-based asynchronous communication mode of the knowledge building forum constrained important aspects of students’ distributed grounding interaction. Constrains are associated with the additional effort required to complete grounding acts in the knowledge building forum. Grounding repair-sequences were repeatedly initiated, but not followed up properly. Instead of contributing to a joint understanding by providing repairs at the task level, the grounding process was interrupted by comments on a meta-level. On some occasions this resulted in “pre-mature meta-cognition” as the participants moved to a meta-level before mastering the basic categories. Processes of grounding were also constrained by display costs. When collaborating on distance the communication was primarily text-based and non-verbal clues were not observable. Timing of utterances turned out to be problematic and the messages frequently arrived out of sequence. This de-contextualized the meaning and partly constrained grounding interaction. However, the knowledge building forum can serve as a collective memory supporting the construction of a common ground that may last over time. Some unexpected patterns have also emerged. Students adopted a pragmatic approach in their collaboration by using one of the knowledge building categories for short, social and coordinating messages. I have identified this as a form of pragmatic grounding; students built a mutual agreement on how to use the tool in a way that was sufficient for the current purpose, but different from the intentions postulated by the designers of the learning environment

Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends and Applications

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue entitled “Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends, and Applications” that was published in Applied Sciences. This Special Issue collected seventeen high-quality papers that discuss the main challenges of multi-robot systems, present the trends to address these issues, and report various relevant applications. Some of the topics addressed by these papers are robot swarms, mission planning, robot teaming, machine learning, immersive technologies, search and rescue, and social robotics

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments examines the definition, function, and application of intellectual property in contexts of electronically mediated social production. With a focus on immaterial production - or the forms of coordinated social activity employed to produce knowledge and information in the networked information economy - this project ultimately aims to demonstrate how current intellectual property paradigms must be rearticulated for an age of digital (re)production. By considering the themes of Piracy , Intellectual Property , and Distributed Social Production this dissertation provides an overview of the current state of peer production and intellectual property in the Humanities and Writing Studies. Next, this project develops and implements a communicational-mediational research methodology to theorize how both discursive and material data lend themselves to a more nuanced understanding of the ways that technologies of communication and coordination effect attitudes toward intellectual property. After establishing both a methodology and an interdisciplinary grounding for the themes of the work, this dissertation presents a grounded theoretic analysis of piratical discourse to reveal what I call the piratical ethos , or the guiding attitudes of individuals actively contesting intellectual property in piratical acts of distributed social production. Congruently, this work also investigates the material dynamics of piratical activity by analyzing the cultural-historical activity systems wherein piratical subjectivity emerges, emphasizing the agenic capacity of interfacial technologies at the scales of user and system. Exploring the attitudes of piratical subjects and the technological genres that mediate piratical activity, I contend that the conclusions drawn from The Piratical Ethos can assist Writing Studies researchers with developing novel methodologies to study the intersections of intellectual property and distributed social production in digital worlds