Analyzing the Contextual Nature of Collaborative Activity

Abstract

This chapter discusses a methodology designed to explore the ­contextual nature of collaborative activity. The methods that can be generally considered to be based on ‘socio-cultural’ discourse analysis are discussed as a means to explore how different aspects of a situation mediate students’ shared meaning-making. First, an analysis is demonstrated, illustrating how different immediate and mediated contexts are embedded in students’ discourse as they are engaged in face-to-face collaborative activity in a computer-mediated context. Second, a multidimensional coding scheme is presented for analyzing the contextualized process of collaborative knowledge construction in an asynchronous web-based discussion. The strengths and weaknesses of the methods are also discussed.