Scripts, games and situations

Retrieved from the TEL opinion blog, July the 28th, 2006

Recently issued, the book entitled “Barriers and Biases in Computer-Mediated Knowledge Communication” contains among several chapters concerning CSCL , all very stimulating, one about the design and evaluation of the use of scripts which seems to me rich of lessons for our research agenda.  The design, implementation and use of scripts is a topic largely addressed in Kaleidoscope (See CoSSICLE or CAVICoLA ), understanding their benefits and limits is surely critical. More precisely this chapter, written by a group of five leading researchers in the domain, addresses the case of social and epistemic scripts. 

What stimulated my curiosity is that the results of the research presented demonstrate that if social scripts seems to have a positive effect, it is not the case for the latter which have “no or negative effects on learning outcomes”.  

The authors suggest that by decreasing the cognitive demand of the learning tasks the epistemic scripts may lower the level of the knowledge construction.  Actually, when looking at the detail of the epistemic script, one may think that not only the level of cognitive demand is (possibly) less important, but that it may be the task itself which is completely modified. Or better said, the situation in which the students are involved is modified by the fact that there is this possibility to get hints to achieve the proposed task. Definitely, instead of “task” it may be “situation” which is here the right word to make sense of what is happening. While the social script to some extend forces mutual attention and learners commitment without any reference to the content at stake, the epistemic scripts do impact the content explicitly reducing the problem solving space of the learners. 
 

In the end, the question which comes after this reading could be: what is the game played by the learners? The difference then between the social and the epistemic scripts, is that the latter do de facto define the situation (they specify what the game is about) while the former stimulate the learners independently of the characteristics of the situation.
 

Then the question becomes: What is the role of the scripts in framing this knowledge game?
 

The book editors in their introduction to this chapter express a doubt that we will need scripts when CSCL will “have become an every day occurrence, like group work in the classroom”. The question I suggest here above, may show that the answer to this doubt is: yes we will need them, and they will be one of the best features of the CSCL environments. As we know, learning is not a natural characteristic of group work, and if there is any learning there is no evidence of the relevance of the outcome. CSCL scripts may reduce the contingent nature of learning outcome, especially the epistemic script as long as they will not be views as tools to facilitate the achievement of a task, but as means to frame stimulate the construction of the relevant learning game (situation) by the learners. The next step might be to characterise CSCL scripts epistemologically valid against a certain learning stake. Quite a challenge…
 

Armin Weinberger , Markus Reiser, Bernhard Ertl, Frank Fischer , Heinz Mandl: Facilitating collaborative knowledge construction in computer-meidated learning environments with cooperation scripts. In: Reiner Bromme, Friedrich W. Hesse and Hans Spada (eds.) Barriers and biases in computer-mediated knowledge communication (pp. 15-37). Berlin: Springer.