Computer supported collaborative learning

Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores how wikis may be used to support primary education students' collaborative interaction and how this such an interaction process can be characterised. The overall aim of this study was is to analyse the collaborative processes of students working together in a wiki environment, to be able to unfoldin order to see how primary students can actively create a shared context for learning in the wiki.Educational literature has already reported that wikis may support collaborative knowledge-construction processes, but in our study, we claim that a dialogic perspective is also needed to accomplish this. Students are requiredmust to develop an intersubjective orientation towards each other participants' perspectives, to be able to co-construct knowledge about a topic. For this purpose, the our project utilised a '"Thinking Together'" -type approach to help students to develop an intersubjective orientation towards one another and to support the creation of a 'dialogic space' to coconstruct new understanding in a wiki science project.The students' asynchronous interaction process in a primary classroom , --which led to the creation of a science text in the wiki --, was analysed and characterised, using a dialogic approach to the study of Computer-Supported Collaborative LearningCSCL practices. Our results illustrate how the 'Thinking Together' approach became embedded within the wiki environment and in the students' collaborative processes. We would argue that a dialogic approach for examining interaction can be used to help to design more effective pedagogic approaches related to the use of wikis in education and to equip learners with the competences they need to participate in the global knowledgeconstruction era.