Thinking at the Small-Group unit of analysis

TITLE OF PAPERs: CSCL Symposium
PRESENTED BY: Sten Ludvigsen

CONFERENCE: CSCL Symposium
DATE: October, 9th, 2004
LOCATION: EPFL, CRAFT


REAL-TIME NOTES / ANNOTATIONS OF THE PAPER:
-G. Stahl, Drexel University, Philadelhia-
Thinking at the Small-Group unit of analysis.

How can we analysie collaborative learning? What are students doing in a video-clip? How should we analyse the interactions?

Should we view a group as the sum of its individual members? I am going to stree the small group as the unit of analysis.

To distinguish the perspective we have to look at Small Group where the activity is targeted to Meaning-making.

There are three theories of Collaborative Learning:
-Vygotsky: internalization
-Lave[1]: participation in a community of practive
-Small groups as enfine of knowledge building: focus on the intermediate unit of analysis.

The small group is the unit that mediates between the individual learning and the community learning. Community participation takes place primarily within small group activities. Individual learning is acquired through …

Group activity theory_ Mediation of Group Cognition_
Shannon trasmission theory situated dialog or discourse theory
Vygotsky mediated cognition mediated group cognition
Engestrom activity structure

Cognition= coherent sequence of meaningful units
Rationality as sequentiality
Dyadic conversation as sequantiality

I see mind as a cognitive artifacts. Group underwent cognitive change.
I can see different kind of collaborative learning. One of them can be called parallel collaboration which intercur when they are working on their own but they are sharing comments and talking aloud.

Making Learning Visible: participants must make thsir learning and understanding visible to each other in order to collaborate. Videas makes thsir display visible to researchers. We can identify member methods and interaction, practices of enactions. Practices can serve as snalysis.

My project is called the Virtual Math Teams.

Group discourse is the medium in which shared meaning is constructed during collaboration: the group cognition emerge as shared siscourse, which provides ideas, vocabulary, artifacts and meaning for both individualparticipants and for their community of practice.

[2]


REFERENCES: {as documents / sites are referenced add them below}

[1] Situated Learning
[2] www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/

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