Productive Multivocality in the Analysis of Group Interactions

The key idea of the book is that scientific and practical advances can be obtained if researchers working in traditions that have been assumed to be mutually incompatible make a real effort to engage in dialogue with each other, comparing and contrasting their understandings of a given phenomenon and how these different understandings can either complement or mutually elaborate on each other. This key idea applies to many fields, particularly in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as education and computer science. The book shows how we have achieved this by presenting our study of collaborative learning during the course of a four-year project. Through a series of five workshops involving dozens of researchers, the 37 editors and authors involved in this project studied and reported on collaborative learning, technology enhanced learning, and cooperative work. The authors share an interest in understanding group interactions, but approach this topic from a variety of traditional disciplinary homes and theoretical and methodological traditions. This allows the book to be of use to researchers in many different fields and with many different goals and agendas.

Daniel D. Suthers: Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, 1993; Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaii. Kristine Lund: Ph.D., Cognitive Science, University of Grenoble, 2003; Senior Research Engineer, CNRS, University of Lyon. Carolyn Penstein Rosé: Ph.D., Language and Information Technologies, Carnegie Mellon University, 1997; Associate Professor, Language Technologies Institute and Human- Computer Interaction Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Nancy Law: Ph.D., Institute of Education, University of London, 1990; Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. Christopher Teplovs: Ph.D., Education, University of Toronto, 2010; Distance Education Project Coordinator, Office of the Vice-Provost, Teaching and Learning, University of Windsor, Canada.