As a learning scientist with a Psychology and English background rather than a Computer Science one, I find the Suthers’ et al. (2010) article a little bit difficult to digest at times. It’s conceptually dense and sophisticated, so it is not exactly easy reading for a sleep-deprived academic mom, but it’s pretty rewarding. I wish I had read this literature when I was trying to analyze the discourse data for my dissertation.
In an attempt to trace how the discourse developed, I did examine Jordan & Henderson (1995) and Barab, Hay, & Yamagata-Lynch’s (2001) action relevant episodes (AREs). In fact, my early meetings with Chris on the design of assessment tools were inspired by these other articles. I wanted to explore ways to capture the development of concepts over time in the discourse (intersubjective) and the development of a particular individual over time (intrasubjective), so the work by Suthers and colleagues would have been useful.
Their research would also have been a good to reference in the conclusions section in my thesis. I speculate about graphical representations in addition to threaded discussion environments for knowledge building discourse. At the time, I was focused on how representations could help students understand the difference between facts and explanations in order to make progress in the group discourse. Suthers, Vatrapu, Medina, Joseph, & Dwyer (2008) suggest that when students use representations, “knowledge maps,” they create more hypotheses and elaborate on them more than students using threaded discussion. I wonder how representations would affect students use of information, i.e. facts? I also speculated about how wikis might be used as a site to collect facts, but it would be interesting to find out what the different environments would be good for and not so good for…
References
Barab, S. A., Hay, K.E., & Yamagata-Lynch, L.C. (2001). Constructing networks of action-relevant episodes: An in situ research methodology. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 10(1&2), 63-112.
Jordan, B., & Henderson, A. (1995) Interaction analysis: Foundations and practice. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4(1), 39-103.
Suthers, D. D., Vatrapu, R., Medina, R., Joseph, S., & Dwyer, N. (2008). Beyond threaded discussion: Representational guidance in asynchronous collaborative learning environments. Computers & Education, 50(4), 1103-1127.
Suthers, D. D., Dwyer, N., Medina, R., & Vatrapu, R. (2010). A framework for conceptualizing, representing, and analyzing distributed interaction. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 5(1), 5-42.
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