A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF COLLABORATIVE KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION THROUGH SHARED REPRESENTATIONS

Abstract

This paper takes one step towards addressing the question of how activity mediated by shared representations — notations that are manipulated by more than one person — might constitute knowledge construction activity, and how the shared representations are appropriated for this purpose. The primary contribution of this paper is a methodology for qualitative analysis of activity in a workspace built on the concept of “uptake”: how participants take up and build on prior contributions. By examining patterns of uptake we can see ways in which participants’ activities constitute an intersubjective cogni- tive activity distributed across persons and the representations they are manipulating. The analysis is conducted in three phases: identification of acts of media manipula- tion, identification of information uptake relations between these acts, and application of theoretical perspectives to identify evidence of knowledge construction via the repre- sentational media. The uptake graph is intended to minimize theoretical commitments in order to support eclectic analysis. The methodology is applied to data from a prior study in which participants collaborated via an evidence map and a chat tool. These case examples illustrate how the methodology uncovered argumentation and knowledge construction conducted solely through the graph workspace.