Seeing What We Build Together: Distributed Multimedia Learning Environments for Transformative Communications

Abstract

We cannot really understand how to create computer support for collaborative learning without first becoming clearer about what we mean by communication, collaboration, and learning. After distinguishing several conceptions of com-munication, and highlighting transformative communications for learning, I consider how, via broadband telepresence, distributed multimedia learning en-vironments may establish such communications by adequately acknowledging the social and material embeddedness of everyday communication. I then de-scribe high-priority areas for advancing this agenda: in sociocultural theory, in examining conceptual change by means of conversational analysis, and in technically establishing affordances of tools to sustain and potentially enhance joint activity beyond the here-and-now and the face-to-face. Although anticipated in Doug Engelbart 's prescient work in the la te 1960s, during the past 5 years a new development has emerged in computer technol-ogies that has been characterized a s computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). Concerned with identifying, exemplifying, and empirically exam-ining the designs o f tools that may contribute to the achievement of collec-tive activity, this subfield of research o n human-computer interaction has spawned (or perhaps begun t o merge with) new studies o f what s o m e have called computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). In a field beset with acronyms, it seems important to get the concepts right before w e abbreviate their terms. In this spirit, I believe that computer support fo r collective learning is truer to experience, because not a l l learning together