Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning: Foundations for a CSCL Community

• Authors: Gerry Stahl
• Venue: CSCL '02 Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning: Foundations for a CSCL Community
• Year: 2002

Learning takes place in communities, facilitated by artifacts, which in turn sustain the communities that generate them. A series of CSCL conferences --- archived in proceedings artifacts like this one --- have been foundational events for a growing CSCL community that has an important role to play in a rapidly, painfully self-transforming global culture. The CSCL community addresses complex and urgent social issues associated with learning in the information era. Despite its healthy growth curve, this research community is still searching for its foundations; to date, there is little consensus on theory, pedagogy, technology or methodology --- even less in the broader world of learning stakeholders. Learning has become a central force of production. Traditional theories and institutions that rose to meet the needs of reproducing knowledge in an industrial world have become fetters on progress: The focus on individual learners obscures the group as the locus of knowledge building and ignores the global interdependence of learning. Fixation on facts distorts the nature of problem-solving inquiry. Modes of thought deriving from the age of rationality and machinery fail to grasp the subtlety of interaction in hyper-networked environments. CSCL instinctively aims beyond yesterday's concepts. Collaborative Learning does not just mean that individual learning is enhanced by participation in small groups; it means that it is the groups themselves that learn. Knowledge is a product of the collaboration process: it arises through interaction of different perspectives, heats up in the cauldron of public discourse, is gradually refined through negotiation, and is codified and preserved in cultural or scientific artifacts. Knowledge is not static and other-worldly: it lives, situated --- both locally and historically --- in groups, teams, organizations, tribes, social networks and cultural flash points. Computer Support does not just mean automating the delivery and testing of facts; it means supporting forms of collaboration and knowledge building that could not otherwise take place without networked communication media and software tools for developing group understandings. Computers can manage the complexity of many-to-many discussions, allowing multiple perspectives to interact without hierarchical structuring. They can overcome the limitations of human short-term memories and of paper-based aides to generating or sharing drafts of documents. CSCL should enable more powerful group cognition, which can synthesize complex interactions of ideas at different scales of collaboration, from small classroom project teams to global open source efforts.