Reigniting CSCL flash themes

This journal promised 6 years ago to publish studies on what it termed “CSCL and its flash themes” (Stahl 2007). Rather than devoting single issues to specific topics of timely prominence, we decided to welcome submissions about selected emerging themes of CSCL research on an on-going basis. Accordingly, we set aflame again in the current issue discussion of the topics of argumentation, scripting, and tabletop interfaces. These three areas of computer support for collaborative learning continue to be active foci of CSCL research. To begin the issue, we spark a new theme with a paper on the use of eye-tracking technology to support and to research collaboration, an approach that has not previously been discussed in this journal but has been gathering attention at the ISLS conferences recently. It is noteworthy that research in these flash themes is still not merely a matter of refining the details of well-established findings, but continues to raise fundamental and controversial theoretical and methodological issues from a CSCL perspective. In introducing their study of gaze perception among dyads of students, Bertrand Schneider and Roy Pea begin with an extended discussion of joint attention. As they document, joint attention is foundational to collaborative interaction and, indeed, to human sociality. From infancy on, people learn to take advantage of different forms and media of joint attention to make intersubjective sense. Any mode of intentionality (whether individual, group, or collective) involves an orientation to some subject matter; communication accordingly requires a coordinated orientation to a shared object, with the understanding that this orientation is shared and with a shared sense of the object’s meaning. For two people to solve a problem together—e.g., in a CSCL setting like answering questions about diagrams—the participants must take (or enact) the problem as the same problem and they must see (and describe) the object as the same object (Stahl 2013, Chapter 8; Zemel and Koschmann 2013). This requirement of successful collaboration is complex, multi-modal, subtle, and learned over a lifetime. It involves discourse, gesture, gaze, cognition, social skills, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning DOI 10.1007/s11412-013-9185-0