Making Collective Progress Visible for Sustained Knowledge Building

This paper presents the design of Idea Thread Mapper (ITM), a timeline-based collective knowledge-mapping tool that interoperates with Knowledge Forum and potentially other learning platforms. Using ITM, students engage in collaborative, metacognitive conversations to identify “juicy” topics that have emerged from their knowledge-building discourse, as their communal focuses, and review ideas addressing each focus as a line of inquiry—an idea thread. A study was conducted in a grade 3 classroom to foster sustained knowledge building through ITM-aided collaborative reflection. Analyses of online discourse, classroom videos, ITM data, and student interviews elaborate the processes and benefits of ITM-aided reflection to foster student awareness of their collective knowledge and collaborative, sustained efforts to advance it.