This paper describes cognitive ethnography as a method of choice for game studies, multimedia learning, professional development, leisure studies, and activities where context is important. Cognitive ethnography is efficacious for these activities, as it assumes that human cognition adapts to its natural surroundings (Hutchins, 1995, 2010) with emphasis on analysis of activities as they happen ...

Sensemaking involves incomplete discovery, inaccurate interpretation, and imperfect action that will fail in someway and likely alter the situation in some unknowable way. Sensemaking demands intense, deep collaboration with participating agents, who many times are physically distributed and come from different groups and organizations. Incorporating collaboration functionality in a piece-meal ...

In this work we argue in favor of an integrative design approach supporting the idea that teachers and learners in a technology enhanced learning environment should be able to adapt the affordances of the representations in order to achieve an optimum coupling of the interface to the socio-cognitive learning needs in the specific context. An adaptable interface can appear as a reactive, coactiv...

This paper examines the tension between the need to maintain diversity and the need to support path creation in the promotion of emerging sustainable technologies. The analysis is framed within the niche development literature and in particular the dynamics of socio-cognitive technology evolution as elaborated by Geels and Raven (2006). This literature offers a framework for analyzing the relat...

This paper aims at presenting the preliminary results of a research work that seeks to understand the users’ response to semantic based technologies, in the context of enterprise sponsored virtual communities. The research follows a qualitative methodology based on an action research approach. It particularly focuses on the socio-cognitive processes that underlie users’ learning and acquisition...

Recent research has shown that language and the socio-cognitive phenomena associated with it can be aptly modeled and visualized through networks of linguistic entities. However, most of the existing works on linguistic networks focus only on the local properties of the networks. This study is an attempt to analyze the structure of languages via a purely structural technique, namely spectral an...

The key research question for this study was to ask whether or not innovative teaching practices would lead to the development of learning outcomes essential for preparing the younger generation for the challenges of life in the knowledge society of the 21st century, and if so, how are the pedagogical features related to the different learning outcomes. Preliminary analyses of the case study da...

In an empirical study, we provided (or not) pairs of students working in a remote collaborative learning situation with a knowledge awareness tool that provided learner A with learner B's level of knowledge measured through a pre-test. We analyzed the effect of the knowledge awareness tool on asymmetric pairs with regards to the prior-knowledge. Post-hoc analysis on the pairs’ knowledge level s...

We discuss the design of an agent for coaching collaborative learning in a distance learning context. The learning domain is entity-relationship modeling, a domain in which collaborative problem solving is regularly practiced, and for which there exist formally interpretable representations of problem solutions known as entity-relationship diagrams. The design of the coach was based on socio-co...

CSCL is based on the idea that computer applications can scaffold and implement advanced socio-cognitive processes for knowledge sharing and knowledge building. But do we really understand these processes that are supposed to be implemented? This paper will focus on the "epistemological infrastructure" of CSCL. We will analyze three models of innovative knowledge communities in order to better ...