Situating CoWeb: a scholarship of application

Since 1998, we have been developing and researching CoWeb, a version of Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb designed to support collaborative learning. In this article, we summarize our results of situating CoWeb across the academic landscape of Georgia Tech. In architecture, CoWeb enabled faculty to serve more students in a design-based course. In English composition, a comparison study demonstrated significant learning benefits without incurring disproportionate costs. Yet, situating CoWeb was not always successful. In many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) classes, students actively resisted collaboration. From these studies, we conclude that the culture of the classroom and the discipline needs to be compatible with the medium for CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) to be effective. Finally, we demonstrate how collaboration can be designed into the culture. A new class on introductory computing was explicitly designed to take advantage of the collaborative possibilities that CoWeb affords. We report our findings of the success of this approach. We characterize this research as a scholarship of application. We demonstrate that this mode of scholarship is a viable mode of scholarship in the learning sciences. Unlike traditional scholarship of discovery, we are not solely concerned with discovering new knowledge. Instead, we support others in the application of a new technology to serve genuine and complex learning situations. By doing so, we seek to understand the potential that one new medium (WikiWikiWeb) has for supporting learning. Understanding a New Medium Media, the channels through which we forge and communicate meaning, affect us as individuals and as a society (McLuhan, 1964; Meyrowitz, 1985). New media change how we relate to ideas, to others, and to ourselves (Turkle, 1984, 1995). As such, a new medium has the potential to be a powerful and natural learning environment (Rick & Lamberty, 2005). Unfortunately, realizing that potential is challenging (Bolter & Grusin, 1999). The effect This article appears in the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (2006), 1(1):89–115. Copyright has been transferred to Springer Verlag. This is a pre-print draft version.