Gerry Stahl's eLibrary

This doctoral dissertation in computer science at the University of Colorado was entitled: "Interpretation in Design: The Problem of Tacit and Explicit Understanding in Computer Support of Cooperative Design" and was defended on August 5, 1993.The dissertation explored the implications of the theory of tacit knowledge for the problem of computer capture of design rationale. It discussed a software system for design by teams of NASA designers. The computer environment captured design ideas in a flexible system of professional perspectives. This research led to explorations after graduation in prototyping collaboration software incorporating mechanisms to support perspectives and negotiation.

Rational thinking as exemplified in mathematical cognition is of undeniable importance in the modern world. This book documents how a group of three eighth-grade girls developed specific practices typical of such thinking through involvement in an online educational experience. The presentation begins by discussing the methodological approach adopted in analyzing the development of mathematical group cognition. An extended case study then tracks the team of students step by step through its eight-hour-long progression. Concluding sections draw the consequences for the theory of group cognition and for educational practice.

Versions of "Computer-supported collaborative learning: An historical perspective" by Gerry Stahl, Timothy Koschmann and Daniel D. Suthers for a global audience: in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Romanian and German. An introduction to the educational research field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning from an interactional perspective. This is the most cited article on CSCL, defining the field in many ways. The current volume makes this article available to readers in several important languages.

Beginning in 2002, a group of researchers and online-math-education-service providers began the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) Project. The mission of the VMT Project is to provide a new opportunity for students to engage in mathematical discourse. There are three primary goals in this project: 1. As service providers, we want to provide a stimulating online service for use by student teams from around the world. 2. As educational-technology designers, we want to develop an online environment that will effectively foster student mathematical discourse and collaborative knowledge building. 3. As researchers, we want to understand the nature of team interaction during mathematical discourse within this new environment.

The essays in this volume seek to address foundational questions related to the concept of group cognition. This concept emerged in the book "Group Cognition", where the theoretical themes of the present volume were already discussed, mainly in Part III, especially Chapter 16. Empirical studies of group cognition in the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) Project involving problems of combinatorics were presented in "Studying VMT", where Part IV focused on conceptualizing group cognition in VMT. When the VMT project switched to dynamic geometry as its mathematical domain, "Translating Euclid" included Chapter 8 on theory, including both a theory of referential resources and reflections on shared understanding. Finally, "Constructing Dynamic Triangles Together" provided a detailed longitudinal case study oriented toward the adoption of group practices as providing preconditions for group cognition.The present volume includes essays that attempted to address the philosophical issues raised in the more general publications. In particular, philosophy of group cognition should tackle the following questions:* What is the nature of group cognition?* What are the conditions of possibility for the existence of group cognition?Question (a) seeks a definition or description of group cognition: What are its characteristics and how does it differ from (or relate to) other forms of cognition, such as individual cognition and social cognition?Question (b) inquires about what the necessary preconditions are that allow for group cognition, such as shared understanding.

The current volume is intended to provide an overview of my eLibrary of 21 volumes of research reports, theory, analysis and essays. It also includes some documentation of my life as the author of these texts. These volumes are all published in digital (epub, mobi, pdf formats), in paperback (at Lulu) and on my website.

Here is a diverse collection of writings, starting with my undergraduate thesis on Nietzsche. After studying German philosophy from Hegel and Marx to Heidegger and Adorno, my writing became excessively complex, trying to capture German syntax in English sentences. Then, during my community organizing days, I learned to write more clearly. This volume reflects those stylistic changes as well as playing with some ideas that are later woven into more academic presentations. This volume includes a wide-ranging diversity of writings on philosophy, aesthetics, politics, technology and history.

As Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning from its founding in 2006 to my retirement from that position at the end of 2015, I drafted an editorial introduction to each quarterly issue. This provided a venue for me to comment on the importance of each published article (from my perspective) and sometimes to offer my ideas or reflections on the field of CSCL or one of its central issues. The 39 introductions included here provide a glimpse into the evolution of the CSCL field during a key decade of its history, as it became internationally established with conferences around the world and with this journal.

Essays in Group-Cognitive Science includes introductions to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) research, methodology and findings.It documents the innovative approach of the Virtual Math Teams Project from 2002-2015. While this project has been extensively described elsewhere, its influential methods of interaction analysis have not been described and motivated in such detail before.This collection of essays on educational technology research will be valuable for researchers and graduate students interested in taking advantage of new technologies to advance education.

This book collects analysis and documents from my efforts to understand the importance and probable future of the salt marshes of Chatham, Massachusetts. In accordance with the spirit of thinking globally about climate change and acting locally to study my surrounding environment, I have tried to assemble information about the marshes, which I enjoy on my daily strolls. I hope this book helps my neighbors to understand and protect our world. Gerry Stahl's professional research is in the theory and analysis of CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning). In 2006 Stahl published "Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge" (MIT Press) and launched the "International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning". In 2009 he published "Studying Virtual Math Teams" (Springer), in 2013 "Translating Euclid," in 2015 a longitudinal study of math cognitive development in "Constructing Dynamic Triangles Together" (Cambridge U.), and in 2021 "Theoretical Investigations: Philosophical Foundations of Group Cognition" (Springer).All his work outside of these academic books is published for free in volumes of essays at Smashwords (or at Lulu as paperbacks at minimal printing cost).Gerry Stahl earned his BS in math and science at MIT. He earned a PhD in continental philosophy and social theory at Northwestern University, conducting his research at the Universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt. He later earned a PhD in computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is now Professor Emeritus at the College of Computation and Informatics at Drexel University in Philadelphia. His website--containing all his publications, materials on CSCL and further information about his work--is at http://GerryStahl.net. This series of books presents the best, most current versions of all of Gerry Stahl's writings and publications,except for what appears in his academically published volumes: Group Cognition (2006, MIT Press),Studying Virtual Math Teams (2009, Springer), Translating Euclid (2013, Morgan Claypool),Constructing Dynamic Triangles Together (2015, Cambridge U.), Theoretical Investigations (2021, Springer).

"Essays in CSCL" reports on the author's research in computer-supported collaborative learning, covering a broad range of topics. It begins with general reflections on the importance of CSCL as a research field, situating Stahl's work on the Virtual Math Teams Project and his theory of group cognition within the field of CSCL. It describes the VMT research project, including its research approach, technology, pedagogy and analysis methods. Mostly, it discusses in some detail the findings that have emerged from the VMT Project about the nature of online interaction in that type of CSCL setting. The volume concludes with reports of current work in the project and future directions that are underway. In this way, it elaborates, deepens and extends the presentation in Stahl's first two major publications, "Group Cognition" (2006, MIT Press) and "Studying Virtual Math Teams" (2009, Springer) and prepares the broader background for the companion volume, "Essays in Group Cognition" (2011, Lulu).

This volume presents the narrative sections from grant proposals by Gerry Stahl to NSF and other funding sources. Included are proposals that won grants that supported his research at the University of Colorado and Drexel University. They propose multi-year research projects in computer-supported collaborative learning and related domains. Even those that were not funded provide visionary ideas. Proposals for ecological preservation are also included.

This book contains adventures in digital geometry for the minds of students in pods and in home-schooling. Learning about geometry has inspired many of the most important thinkers for centuries and helped them to make sense of the world. This sequence of 50 hands-on challenges will step learners through the most exciting experiences of geometry, from basic points, lines and circles to construction and proof. The book is structured as a game: a series of thought-provoking challenges that provides a stimulating experience of collaboration with pod-mates and a fun introduction to geometry.Online and pod-based education opens new opportunities for highly motivating and effective approaches. However, success requires innovative and well-designed tasks. The present "Dynamic Geometry Game for Pods" translates the learning of traditional Euclidean geometry into an engaging, stimulating and collaborative experience for online pods of students or for individual home-schooled students.Dynamic geometry is a recent transformation of classic geometry into an online app, which allows one to explore geometric figures by dragging them around the computer screen. Students can construct their own figures and receive immediate automated feedback about the results. This can provide a lively, hands-on experience of geometry.

This collection of case studies from Virtual Math Teams Project data includes teams working on problems of dynamic geometry. This volume includes papers that introduced the transition of the VMT Project to its focus on collaborative learning of dynamic geometry, as well as paperswritten from various theoretical perspectives with colleaguesthat reflected on details of the data from this final period of the project.

This volume considers the two most important philosophers of the modern age. Today, the philosophies of Marx and Heidegger are still extremely relevantprovided one adapts them to the current socio-historical context and adjusts each to the implicit criticisms of the otheras indicated in this book. In particular, Marx countered the ideology of individualism by analyzing social structures and interpersonal interactions at different units of analysis than the individual person. Heidegger also questioned the traditional ontology of natural objects with innate attributes by proposing dynamic interactive processes of beings in their ecological context.When the author attended Northwestern University, it had the only American department of philosophy that encouraged the study of European philosophy. He also conducted the research for this doctoral dissertation during three years in Germany: at Heidelberg, where Heidegger's work was continued, and at Frankfurt, where critical theory extended Marx' thinking.Recently, the author returned to the confrontation of Marx and Heidegger, illustrated with the explorations of electronic music. This brief essay is appended to the book to show how its themes have persisted and matured over 50 years. During his intervening academic career, the author applied conceptual and methodological perspectives from Marx and Heidegger to the theory of CSCL (computer-supported collaborative learning), developing a theory of group cognition.

This book suggests that an approach to collaborative dynamic geometry can be designed to transform the teaching of Euclidean geometry from a rigidified procedural approach based on memorization of authoritative texts to a human-centered exploration of a foundational source of informatics and rigorous thinking. It introduces a research project to explore the proposed translation of geometry education. This example of the redesign of a subfield of human-centered informatics involves multiple inter-related dimensions, including cognitive history, contemporary philosophy, school mathematics, software technology, collaborative learning, design-based research, CSCL theory, developmental pedagogy, and scaffolded practice.

"Theoretical Investigations" argues for a particular vision of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), centered on a specific paradigm of collaborative learning, which is explored by a sequence of reprints from the "International Journal of CSCL."A series of other essays reviews contributions to a theory of group cognition as foundational for CSCL research and practice. These papers are gathered from reports of the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) research project.

The Virtual Math Teams Project developed a collaboration environment and integrated a powerful dynamic mathematics application into it, namely the open-source GeoGebra, which integrates geometry, algebra and other forms of math in a dynamic computational environment. The project made the incorporated GeoGebra multi-user, so that small groups of students can share their mathematical explorations and co-construct geometric figures online. In support of teacher and student use of this collaboration environment, it developed several versions of a set of activities to systematically introduce people to dynamic geometry, including core concepts from Euclid, standard geometry textbooks and the Common Core Standards for Geometry.This volume reproduces the successive versions of the VMT curriculum in dynamic geometry. In consecutive years, the curriculum focused more tightly on introducing teacher teams and student teams to the concept of invariant dependencies, which is central to the theory and implementation of dynamic geometry. The collection of versions shows how the curriculum evolved in response to observations of how teachers and students were responding to it.The topics for VMT with GeoGebra are available for free download in several versions. They all include GeoGebra tasks to work on collaboratively and tutorials on the use of VMT and GeoGebra software. The best version is the active GeoGebraBook version . Here, you can try out all the activities yourself. (Future version of VMT-mobile or of GeoGebra may allow you to do those same activities collaboratively with chat in persistent rooms.) Several versions of the curriculum are included here in reverse chronological order.

This collection of case studies from the Virtual Math Teams Project data includes teams working on problems of combinatorics. In particular, two teams that interacted on the same mathematics problems during 2006 provide a variety of insights into the nature of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

The idea of personalizable software is fashionable today. I explored it in a number of software prototypes a decade or two earlier. The perspectives mechanism in Hermes, my dissertation software system, was an initial major initiative in this direction, allowing specialists to personalize their views of designs and associated design rationale. WebNet was a follow-up system to integrate the perspective mechanism into discussion-forum collaboration software. Subsequent systems explored personalization mechanisms in systems for work and for learning, including TCA for teachers developing and sharing curriculum and systems for automated critics in design systems or reviewers of journal articles. In each case, the mechanisms were intended to support users to view and discuss materials from their personal perspectives and to share those views with others to encourage building group perspectives. The volume is organized in terms of essays on (a) structured hypermedia, (b) personalizable software, (c) software perspectives and (d) applications to health care, education and publishing.