Orchestrating the flow and advancement of knowledge artifacts in an online class

This paper explores orchestration support introduced to an online class to help students operate as a knowledge community. A technological design was introduced to provide a flexible, dynamic learning environment so that ideas and knowledge artifacts can flow across time, space, and people in the community. With support from a CSCL technology named FROG, we incorporated several general-purpose tools to support a variety of collaborative activities and relied on FROG as a backbone to connect these tools and orchestrate knowledge flows among them. Through a mixed-methods case study, we investigated the ways in which the design facilitated the flow of knowledge artifacts and idea development. Detailed analysis of a rich dataset revealed multiple ways in which ideas and artifacts flowed in the community, leading to growth in both individual learning and group projects. However, these phenomena varied across groups. This paper advances the community approach to learning by devising new technological and pedagogical supports. It also highlights the prospect of bringing guidance, control, and agency—long-standing issues of CSCL—into productive dialogues.