Rediscovering cscl

Abstract

In their penultimate sentence, Hakkarainen, Lipponen, and Järvelä correctly point out that CSCL researchers have a complex challenge because the educational use of new information/communication technologies is inextricably bound up with new pedagogical and cognitive practices of learning and instruction. The naïve, technology-driven view was that tools such as CSILE would make a significant difference on their own. The subsequent experience has been that the classroom culture bends such tools to its own interests, and that this culture must be transformed before new media can mediate learning the way we had hoped they would. So CSCL research has necessarily and properly shifted from the affordances and effects of the technology to concerns with the instructional context. Thus, the central conclusions of Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the teacher's role and say little that pertains to the presence of CSILE.