Final draft for publication in Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning 1(2). 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 during a collaborative task—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 information uptake we can see ways in which participants ’ activities constitute an intersubjective cognitive activity distributed across persons and the representations they are manipulating. The analysis is conducted in three phases: identification of acts of media manipulation, identification of information uptake relations between these acts, and application of appropriate theoretical perspectives to interpret the uptake graph. The uptake graph is intended to minimize theoretical commitments in order to support eclectic analysis. Several theoretical perspectives on how representations might mediate collaborative knowledge construction are surveyed to identify the kinds of events we would look for as evidence of knowledge construction via a representational medium. The methodology is applied to data from a prior study in which participants collaborated via a graphical representation as well as a verbal “chat ” tool. These case examples illustrate how the methodology uncovered argumentation and knowledge construction conducted solely through the graph workspace