Understanding Educational Computational Artifacts Across Community Boundaries

Viewed within its activity system, learning is a social process in which artifacts – whether physical, digital or linguistic – play central roles. Even individual learning is immersed in contexts of collaborative learning, in which communities define structures of meaning, goals of research, distribution of tasks and audiences for new knowledge. The field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is devoted to designing and evaluating artifacts such as communication media and digital simulations that foster learning by groups in schools. The artifacts in question must be understood by three communities: their designers, their users and their researchers. As meaningful physical objects, artifacts by definition both provide persistence across the three communities and require interpretation by each community. The first community designs into the artifact meaningful affordances that must be properly understood in practice by the second community. To evaluate the success of this undertaking, the third community must interpret the designed affordances and also interpret the users’ practical understandings of these. As researchers, we take a detailed look in this paper at how a group of middle school students understands a digital simulation as they collaboratively struggle to use it to solve a scientific task. We focus on a particular moment of collaboration lasting 17 seconds that was particularly hard to understand from the transcript. A micro discourse analysis of this moment demonstrates that the students were engaged in making visible to each other the structure of references within their discourse that