Toward Assessment of Knowledge-Building Practices in Technology-Mediated Work Group Interactions

The virtual spaces of TI provide places where teachers and other educational professionals can “meet” and collaborate and where artifacts and tools can be created and stored. To help us better understand the tool wanted to study, we began by using TI as the primary means of communication for our research team. Negotiation has been described generally as involving the conversational moves of presenting; giving responses that accept, question, or object to presented ideas; and affirming or repairing interpretations to reach mutual understanding. The broader cultural and institutional contexts within which smaller communities of practice develop and reside provide social norms that may implicitly be appropriated and reproduced in specific group interactions. Semiotic mediation occurs through the novice’s appropriation and use of a community’s tangible and psychological tools, where the term tool is broadly construed to include a community’s language, conceptual understandings, symbol systems, customs, software, skills, and so on.