Collaborative knowledge building: Towards a knowledge creation perspective

Abstract

Introduction Helping students to engage in collaborative inquiry and work creatively with ideas is now a major educational goal. Despite widespread interest in inquiry learning and computer-supported learning, most schools continue to focus on surface forms of constructivist learning, with students busily engaged in gathering information from the Web and completing tasks (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003); for example, inquiry learning is o en limited to predetermined goals, sequences of activities, and xed standards that focus on skills rather than creating knowledge, which is the goal of real scienti c inquiry (Chinn & Malhotra, 2002). Sustained and emergent inquiry that aims at knowledge creation, much valued in scienti c and innovative communities, poses major challenges for theories and designs for collaborative learning.