Technologies for knowledge-building discourse

T here are pervasive strategies for school work that may be broadly characterized as knowledge reproduction strategies. They have limited potential for advancing knowledge, and often are not even very effective for purposes of memorization and organization of knowledge. Their most conspicuous failure, however, is in the development of understanding. Knowledge building strategies are, by contrast, focused centrally on the development of understanding. These strategies, however, are comparatively rare among school children [6]. Worse yet, they seem destined to remain so because school discourse effectively excludes them. Educational computing, unfortunately, tends to support knowledge reproduction strategies rather than knowledge-building ones. While this is obvious regarding much of the courseware on the market, in a more subtle way it is equally true of the software tools that are popularly thought to encourage more active learning. An explanation may be found in the origins of these software tools and in the evolution of the personal computer as a workstation. This evolution has been toward meeting the needs of a business community concerned with storing and retrieving information (hence, the saliency of files and folders), transferring it (hence, cut-and-paste, import-export, and communications software), displaying it (hence, graphing, graphics, desktop publishing, and multimedia presentation software), and making plans and decisions based on it (hence, spreadsheets, accounting, and projectmanagement software). Put it all together, and you have the desktop metaphor. It is not a metaphor for the construction and advancement of understanding. It represents activities that are important in any kind of information processing environment. We propose that these activities-copying, deleting, storing, retrieving, entering, displaying, and sending-be thought of as first-order knowledge-processing activities. In order to serve the purposes of knowledgebuilding, however, they must be subordinated to a second-order system of activities that has understanding as its primary purpose. In this article we discuss second-order computing facilities and a system we are developing that aims to foster and support knowledge building in school. The system is computer-supported intentional learning environments (CSILE). It aims to engage students in the same sorts of intellectual and cultural processes that sustain realworld scientists in efforts at knowledge advancement.