510

Bereiter and Scardamalia’s emphasis on knowledge-building, and their insistence on its pedagogical priority, and its importance in the design of computer-supported intentional learning environments represents the hallmark of their unique and significant contribution to educational research. The authors make a clear and compelling distinction between learning and knowledge-building, that is worth thinking about at some length.

Whereas a great deal of school-based activity is oriented towards enhancing “learning,” this accomplishment, while significant, does not promote the production of clear and articulable advances in knowledge, nor does it enact a communal orientation towards the latter as a normative goal. And so it is quite possible to learn to read, but not to engage in reading activities as a means of knowledge transformation. It’s quite possible to learn all the elements in the Periodic Table, and have no interest in why the Table was created in the first instance, or what is its significance in scientific reasoning and research as, itself, a conceptual artifact.

Scardamalia and Bereiter, like Papert, are concerned about the flurry of activities in school that purport to make innovative uses of new media. An analysis of the focus of students’ work in these projects reveals (a) a “recreation of the familiar” (think, students making digital videos that simply reproduce knowledge already assembled elsewhere) and (b) superficial engagements with knowledge (knowledge-telling versus knowledge-transforming).

CSILE (computer supported intentional learning environment) was the authors’ first computer-based learning environment, CSILE, was extensively field-tested and the focus of a great deal of research in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Bereiter and Scardamalia released a commercially available product, Knowledge Forum.

CSILE is a networked computer-based environment that reorients learner activity towards achieving “cognitive objectives” and scaffolds collaborative work so as to support the “restructuring of schools as knowledge-building communities.” Carefully read the description of the cognitive and related social structures of schools that the authors provide (p. 268) and think about how it is that designs for educational activity orient participants towards particular kinds of cognitive objectives.

Scardamalia and Bereiter argue that new knowledge media support initiatives to restructure schools as knowledge-building communities. CSILE was designed in order to leverage particular affordances of networked media. At the heart of CSILE is its communal database. Participants contribute conceptual artifacts to this database that can be linked with the ongoing work of other community members. Cognitive scaffolding is provided by means of the flagging of notes with categories that index the contents in reference to the kind of thinking, or the metacognitive activity, that it represents, such as “My theory…”, or “What I need to know…”.

Lax, Taylor, Wilson-Pauwels, and Scardamalia (2004) discuss the design of Knowledge Forum <http://www.knowledgeforum.com/> , which is Scardamalia and Bereiter’s successor knowledge-building environment to CSILE. Knowledge Forum is widely used in educational (and other) settings internationally. The article we have read for this module outlines significant links between the design of Knowledge Forum, a pedagogical intervention premised on an educational model of knowledge-building, and the use of this technology-supported learning environment by a medical legal visualization class. This article productively outlines concrete relationships between pedagogical notions about how to support knowledge-building, and specific design characteristics that are built-in to Knowledge Forum. It is interesting and stimulating to think about what it is that makes Knowledge Forum explicitly educational in its design, in comparison with other networked technologies that are commonly used to support learning, such as the Web. One of these critical design features is the explicit separation of a representation of knowledge and an epistemic relationship to that knowledge that focuses on the extent to which it consists in a contribution to new knowledge – to innovation in that knowledge community. It is, indeed, rare, for the design of learning environments in schools to include affordances that highlight and scaffold what Scardamalia and her colleagues refer to as “epistemic agency”.

Scardamalia and Bereiter ask educators to look to existing communities of inquiry (e.g., scientific communities) in order to discern what are the relevant structures and practices that are characteristic of organizations that produce and sustain knowledge advances. There are commonalities between the approach to designing productive educational activity, and related uses of technology, suggested by Scardamalia and Bereiter, and “inquiry learning” or “project-based learning.” However the authors argue that the focus on “knowledge-building” is distinctive. The discussion of the relationship between knowledge-building and the important role of publication in scholarly journals that represents a cornerstone of scientific communities helps us to see what might be distinctive about their argument.