Learning across levels

Abstract

The theme of this year’s CSCL 2013 conference—“To see the world and a grain of sand: Learning across levels of space, time and scale”—targets a provocative challenge for CSCL, namely that the interactions of collaborative learning be understood, supported and analyzed at multiple levels. As the conference call puts it, “the attention to the theoretical, methodological and technological issues of addressing research at multiple levels is highly relevant to current research in CSCL, as well as to developing an emerging understanding of the epistemological and methodological issues that will shape our intellectual efforts well into the future” (http://isls.org/cscl2013). The attempt to bridge across levels of analysis—in CSCL theory, analysis and practice— stands at the forefront of CSCL research today. CSCL research typically investigates processes at the individual, small-group and community units of analysis. However, individual CSCL studies generally each focus on only one of these units. Moreover, there is little data-based analysis of how the three levels are connected, although it is clear that such connections are crucially important to understanding and orchestrating learning in CSCL settings. The introduction to the last issue of ijCSCL (Stahl 2012b) proposed that the levels of individual learning, group cognition and community knowledge building may be connected by emergent interactional resources, which can mediate between the levels.