TOOL5100: CSCL Intersubjectivity

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Collaboration & learning I: Intersubjectivity and common ground

Pål Fugelli

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Intersubjectivity, what is it about?

- Shared understandings- Interpersonal phenomena- Necessary for bridging the known and the

new in communication (Rogoff et al., 1993).

- Increasingly considered an essential aspect of learning (see i.e. Matusov, 2001)

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”In-between” subjectivities

Related concepts:

• The sphere in between (Buber)

• Intersubjective space (Crossley)

• Shared prolepsis (Rommetveit)

• Grounding (i.e. Clark, Baker)

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Research agenda for CSCL

CSCL is described as the study of practices of meaning-making in the context of joint activity and the ways in which these practices are mediated through designed artifacts. (Koschmann, 2002 cited in Suthers)

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Grounding

• Grounding is the name given to the interactive processes by which common ground (or mutual understanding) between individuals is constructed and maintained (Baker et al., 1999) .

• A process of adding information to the common ground between individuals while communicating (Clark & Brennan, 1991).

• All collective actions (including learning) are accordingly built on a common ground.

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Linguistics, CHAT and CSCL

Baker et al. (1999) maintains that language science “provides fine-grained cognitive models of the grounding process, collaboration and how the two relate, within the short timescale on isolated verbal interactions” (p. 32).

On the other hand, CHAT offers a conception of learning as an appropriation of tools, enabling us to get an idea of language’s function in a CSCL environment.

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Example: Activity system from the Gene-Ethics (CSCL) scenario

ToolsFLE3, Internet,

language

Rules and norms

School culture

SubjectLocal group

ObjectFinishing the

task

Division of labour

CommunityDistributed

group

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Grounding-principles

1. The grounding criterion:

The contributor and the partners mutually believe that the partners have understood what the contributor meant to a criterion sufficient for the current purpose.

(Clark & Schaefer, 1989)

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Grounding-principles

2. The principle of least collaborative effort:

Speakers are likely to spend just enough effort as is needed for the current purpose..

(Clark & Brennan, 1991)

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Media constraints on groundingPossible constraints a medium may impose on

communication Clark and Brennan (1991):1. co-presence 2. visibility 3. audibility 4. co-temporality 5. simultaneity 6. sequentiality7. reviewability8. revisability

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Rommetveit’s dialogic approach to intersubjectivity

• Based on a dialogic epistemology (see Linell)

• By joining dialogical interactions, we temporarily establish shared understandings of utterances in a sociocultural context.

• Every communicative act builds upon the commitment to “a temporarily shared social world" (Rommetveit, 1974:29)

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Prolepses

• Intersubjectivity must be taken for granted in order to be (partially) achieved.

• Shared prolepsis describes what is presupposed or taken for granted by participants prior to interaction.

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The spatial-temporal interpersonal co-ordinates of the act of speech

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Perfect intersubjectivity?

• Communication aims at transcendence of the ‘private’ worlds of the participants (Rommetveit, 1979:94)

• But: our ‘pluralistic’ social world (and others) can only be partially shared and fragmentarily known.

-> Perfect intersubjectivity is not possible. Its never complete..

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The carburetor story A lady who is a very knowledgeable amateur auto mechanic

discovers that there is something wrong with the carburetor of her car. Her husband, who is notoriously ignorant about car engines and does not even know what a carburetor looks like, offers to drive the car to a garage to have it repaired. He tells the car mechanic at the garage, “There is apparently something wrong with the carburetor.” This saves the latter considerable time in searching for the problem.

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Practical

Interpret the utterance

”There is apparently something wrong with the carburetor.”

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Further development

• Object-orientation in distributed knowledge practices.

• The adaptation of Rommetveits perspective to account for intersubjectivity at a distance’ in collective activity systems (Engeström, 2001).

• Inter-worlds in cyberspace..