Analyzing roles of individuals in small-group collaboration processes

The papers in this issue present innovative approaches to analyzing the roles of individuals in small-group collaborations supported by computer technologies. In reading these articles, you may find it interesting to consider the ways in which their methods conceptualize the relationship of collaborative group learning to the roles of its individual participants. Taken together, these studies envision and explore a space of possible strategies for analyzing the multi-level phenomena of collaborative learning, sometimes coding utterances of individuals and at other times characterizing group trajectories. They each push the boundaries of CSCL research in various ways. Although they can be read as primarily proposing analytic procedures, they also contribute to theory and technology. Perhaps highlighting their nuanced stances on the issue of unit-of-analysis in probing learning data can help to reveal their contributions to the advance of CSCL as a vision and as a field. It is often difficult to determine where overall progress is being made in CSCL research and practice. Statistical indicators in comparative reviews tend to be overwhelmed by the diversity of theories and methodologies applied in research and by the variety of pedagogies adopted in practice. In both researcher and teacher communities, there are new participants entering with training in traditional disciplines as well as long-time participants still working within old paradigms. Folk theories derived from common sense linger on and may obscure the visibility of innovations in scientific theory, methodology or pedagogy. Folk theories of minds and learning still influence classroom practice. According to Bruner (1996) and Bereiter (2002), teachers’ pedagogy is often deeply affected by everyday intuitive Intern. J. Comput.-Support. Collab. Learn. (2014) 9:365–370 DOI 10.1007/s11412-014-9204-9