Developing understanding beyond the given knowledge and new methodologies for analyses in CSCL

Abstract

In schools and educational settings, students increasingly need to learn content and perspectives that are not given as part of the curriculum. When working with digital resources embedded in digital environments and infrastructures, students’ and teachers’ tasks often become more complex and need more social and cognitive framing. The sequential organization of textbooks has historically provided teachers and students with well-established structures for student actions. However, when other resources become more important, designers, teachers, and students need to establish additional forms of supports and scaffolds for learning. The first two papers in this issue address this theme, focusing on how to support students in their work with digital resources. The other two papers look at important methodological issues in computer-supported collaborative learning to analyze and describe collaborative work. The third paper problematizes the coding-and-counting approach in CSCL and provides an alternative method for analyzing and understanding temporality in learning. The authors of this paper argue that epistemic network analysis offers a better account of how learning emerges over time than coding-and- counting. The fourth paper argues for the importance of a well-formulated theoretical framework in CSCL research, and demonstrates that different approaches to big data methods can shed light on learning and knowledge development in CSCL when framed using sociocognitive conflicts and productive friction as the main concepts. © International Society of the Learning Sciences, Inc. 2018