Group Cognition (pre-publication version) (ePub)

This volume is a pre-publication version of Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge, published by MIT Press in 2006. These materials were last revised March 16, 2005, from the final manuscript. This version has not been edited, laid out or paginated by MIT Press. Please do not cite page numbers from this version or quote from it. This version is only for informal use and may not be duplicated. Please refer to the MIT Press version for official usage, citation and pagination.

Global and local networks of linked computers make collaborative working, learning, and acting possible through innovative uses of computer technology. In Group Cognition Gerry Stahl explores the technological and social reconfigurations that are needed to achieve computer supported collaborative knowledge building--group cognition that transcends the limits of individual cognition. Computers can provide active media for social group cognition where ideas grow through the interactions within groups of people; software functionality can manage group discourse that results in shared understandings, new meanings, and collaborative learning. Stahl offers software design prototypes, analyzes empirical instances of collaboration, and elaborates a theory of collaboration that takes the group, rather than the individual, as the unit of analysis.