The Third International Conference on the Learning Sciences ( ICLS - 98 ) “ Learning Perspectives ”

Learning as a socially situated activity involves an interplay between group and personal perspectives. Knowledge is constructed within nested perspectives that reflect social practices, shared meanings, and individual understandings. Educational software to support collaborative learning can represent these perspectives for learners to help them reflect on their own perspectives and negotiate group perspectives on knowledge. By providing different views on a shared and growing knowledge base, perspective-based software distinguishes different people’s ideas to make clear each person’s perspective on common topics. Individuals work on their own ideas, share them, and propose them for group adoption. The convergence needed for successful collaborative learning emerges from a process of negotiation in which divergent positions are distinguished and discussed. Students using the software have a representation for thinking about learning perspectives, a mechanism for organizing their own perspectives in relation to those of their classmates, and a tool for mediating formative involvements in collaboration, research, and negotiation. “Learning Perspectives” proposes perspectives on learning as a social, linguistic, and perspectival process. It introduces a software mechanism for representing and organizing group and personal knowledge to scaffold learners’ learning about perspectives. Then it illustrates the use of perspectives for learning in project-based classrooms.