Towards a Dialogic Understanding of the Relationship between Teaching Thinking and CSCL

structures of explicit reasoning, or to simple notions of constructing shared knowledge. They consist more in a divergent exploration of a field of potential perspectives on a topic. Through using this tool participants report that they are stimulated to think more deeply (Wegerif, Ravenscroft and McAlister, 2005). Conclusions The teaching and learning of general thinking skills, especially creativity and learning to learn, is hard to understand through a neo-Vygotskian perspective which focuses on the use of tools for the social construction of knowledge. Understanding is an event within a dialogue between perspectives and is not reducible to a constructed representation. A focus on tools and construction cannot explain creative insights and is hard to convert into a pedagogy for teaching general thinking skills since tools are always specific to tasks. Teaching thinking is much easier to understand through a dialogic perspective which focuses on the opening, deepening and broadening of reflective spaces. What is missing from the neo-Vygotskian account is the importance of the implicit space of possibilities opened up by dialogue which allows for creative emergence and which is the irreducible context for the interpretations of signs and representations. This dialogic interpretative framework implies the need for a pedagogy of teaching dialogic, that is the ability to sustain more than one perspective simultaneously, as an end in itself and as the primary thinking skill upon which all other thinking skills are derivative. This pedagogy can be described in terms of moving learners into the space of dialogue. Tools, including language and computer environments, can be used for opening up and maintaining dialogic spaces and for deepening and broadening dialogic spaces. In many cases the pedagogic practices that follows from this dialogic interpretative framework are already happening, this includes the promotion of communities of enquiry and dialogue skills, the use of forums of alternative voices to induct students into debate, engagement in real dialogues across cultural and geographic differences using the internet, scaffolding induction into such dialogues using synchronous and asynchronous environments, amongst others. The purpose of the dialogic framework for CSCL is therefore not necessarily suggesting new pedagogical strategies but rather in providing an interpretative framework that can be applied retrospectively to pedagogical practices that have emerged through the intuition of practitioners in a way that reveals what is of real value in these practices and so can serve as a basis for future design. The dialogic framework proposed in this paper responds to the educational needs of our cultural and historical situation as articulated by Castells (2001, p 278). The internet is, amongst other things, an expanding cacophony of competing voices. Teaching general thinking and learning skills, in the context of the shift to a global ‘Networked Society’, is at least partly about teaching students how to use the internet for thinking and learning. Whilst being able to participate in the construction of shared knowledge is clearly an important aim of education, the dialogic perspective argued for in this paper claims that it is even more important, as both a preliminary requirement for construction and as the context of construction, that students in the networked society learn how to listen to other voices. 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