July 18, 2007 Half-day Tutorial

Introduction to Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

This is a half-day tutorial for anyone interested in finding out more about CSCL, particularly its theoretical bases on how collaboration works toward better learning.  There will be lots of hands-on activities of collaborative learning, externalizing one’s own ideas, sharing and comparing them with others, to think deeper than usual on how we could ever learn from collaboration. New comers to this field are particularly welcome.

We are living in a society with changes at the speed no one has ever experienced in history.  This situation requires learning of higher quality, which no theory of learning in the past appears to be adequate to guide.  The situation calls for “community of learners,” where learning is expected to sustain over time, across different situations.  The goal of such learning is not the learning of facts, but of flexible, generative knowledge not bound with concrete situations where it is learned. To fulfill such a goal, new research on learning takes collaboration as its standard form seriously, and implements and evaluates technological support to materialize collaboration into effective learning designs.  If you are fascinated with these fundamental ideas of CSCL, but have not had much experience in participating in collaborative learning yourself, this tutorial would provide you with a unique experience to be able to talk about it, to reflect upon it, so that you yourself would be confident in promoting CSCL research in your own style. Naomi Miyake has given a number of CSCL tutorials in the past and is President-elect of the International Society of the Learning Sciences.

Please register as soon as possible for the workshop but before April 30 through the CSCL conference site.