Creativity, collaboration and competence: agency in online synchronous chat environment

Agency is potentially an important concept for CSCL as researchers think about the effectiveness of online learning environments and the ways they encourage groups to take active control of their learning activities. This paper reports on several sessions of mathematics problem solving in the VMT Chat environment. The VMT Chat is a synchronous chat and whiteboard space for students to collaboratively define and work on problems that are open-ended and that encourage students to define the questions themselves. We draw on the anthropological, psychological and sociological traditions and their concept of agency in order to produce a robust analysis of several segments of student work in the VMT Chat. Our analysis suggests that there are structural features to the VMT Chat environment that encourage “agentic behavior” on the part of students. This has important implications for learning and the structure of pedagogic activities.