The Orchestrated Collaborative Classroom: Designing and Making Sense of Heterogeneous Ecologies of Teaching and Learning Resources

Abstract

The physical face-to-face classroom still represents the core educational setting in which everyday CSCL practice takes place. However, current classrooms are not limited anymore to books, blackboards and other physical artifacts: laptops, tablets, digital whiteboards, wikis, shared applications and simulations have also become part of this learning landscape. These last ones add new layers of complexity to the everyday educational practices and the dynamics of the classroom. CSCL researchers have traditionally proposed standalone systems or innovations, focusing their evaluation on the effects and management of a single system/intervention. However, everyday classroom activities involve multiple subject matters, different pedagogical approaches as well as a variety of technologies. The assumption that our innovation is alone no longer holds. The multiplicity and heterogeneity of resources (digital and legacy) pose a unique set of opportunities and challenges for the CSCL research community, which are bound to become stronger as time goes by. This collaborative workshop brought together technology designers, researchers and practitioners, in an attempt to match CSCL technologies to the pedagogical needs and contextual constraints of practitioners, identify a set of guidelines to design and connect existing CSCL systems with each other and with legacy classroom resources, and help teachers and students to make sense of these heterogeneous learning ecologies.