Collaborative Learning, Reasoning, and Technology

摘要

The first thing you should know when picking up Collaborative learning, reasoning, and technology is the style and content of what you are about to read. This compilation of academic research is intense reading that details studies on collaboration in educational settings complete with extremely intricate hypotheses, methodologies, and discussions of results. This is not a practical how-to book that can be read quickly. It is instead one to read slowly and carefully, a book to ponder. These studies are especially interesting and useful for educators. The research is a collection of papers from the 2002 Rutgers Invitational Symposium on Education. The common threads among the 14 chapters are collaboration and technology, and to some extent argumentation; however, each study has a unique hypothesis to explore and report on. The first two chapters "In- troduction: Learning with technology" and "A developmental perspective on virtual scaffolding for learning in home and school contexts," give the reader a map of the subsequent chapters and provide a nice overview of why these studies have been conducted in the first place. They also set the tone for the rest of the book and provide background on collaboration from prominent educational theorists. The chapters do not have to be read sequentially, and that fact is a benefit to the book because it is dense reading. And while all of the research has been conducted in academic settings from elementary to post-secondary schools, I would not discount the book entirely as a technical communication practitioner.