The 2015 Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning conference was in sunny Gothenburg, Sweden this summer. Camillia Matuk presented the latest findings of an Idea Manager study, which happily won the award for Best Design Paper!
This study explicitly prompted students to seek either similar or different ideas from a public idea repository, and looked at the effects on three things: students’ perceptions of the influence of their peers on their own thinking, students actual revisions as a result of seeing their peers’ ideas, and the conceptual understanding students eventually constructed by the end of a several-day long science unit.
Read the paper here:
Matuk, C. & Linn, M. C. (2015). Examining the real and perceived impacts of a public idea repository on literacy and science inquiry. In CSCL’15: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, Gothenburg, Sweden: International Society of the Learning Sciences. [PDF]