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Bridging: Interactional mechanisms used by online groups to sustain knowledge building over time

Johann W. Sarmiento - College of Information Science & Technology - Virtual Math Teams, Drexel University

Abstract

In naturalistic settings, the sustained knowledge building of virtual groups and online communities requires that co-participants overcome a wide range of gaps in their interactions, especially in the context of long-term activity across multiple episodes and collectivities. Here we present an analysis of sequences of online collaborative problem-solving sessions held by K-12 students participating in the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) online community in an attempt to explore to what extent the teams found such interactional gaps relevant. Our analysis is aimed at understanding how the teams bridged the apparent discontinuity of their collaborative interactions (e.g. multiple collaborative sessions, teams, and problem tasks) and exploring the role that such bridging activity plays in their knowledge building over time. In particular, we examine whether bridging allows participants to construct and maintain a joint problem space over time and manage their participation based on it. In addition, we reflect on how these insights might inform the design of appropriate computational supports for long-term collaborative knowledge building.

Introduction

Knowledge Building can be defined as "the creation, testing, and improvement of conceptual artifacts" (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 2003, p. 13). Among such conceptual artifacts used as knowledge-in-the-world one can include theories, designs, solution strategies, plans, categories and other reasoning devices we use to make sense of particular aspects of situations we participate in. They play a key role in the joint knowledge work of multiple co-participants and also in the sustainability of activity over time. For instance, an individual might internalize some resources developed by a group and create a cognitive artifact that later can be used as an interactional resource to do further work by the same or a completely different group (Vygotsky, 1930/1978, 1934/1986, Stahl, 2002). In this sense, knowledge building is primarily interactional activity (collective and individual) comprised of a set of methods through which people-in-interaction develop and advance their understanding -of a math question, a sociological theory, a personal decision, etc. Through the analysis of knowledge building interactions we can recognize the methods use to evolve the current understanding of individuals within a group and also those methods used to advance the understanding of what is known about something by others. In problem solving activity, for example, co-participants create, revise, manipulate, and monitor a set of resources, personal and collective, that allow them to advance their understanding of the problem as such and also project relevant aspects of their activity (e.g. partial results, impasses, reasoning procedures, candidate answers, etc.) towards other individuals or groups in the past or future. This dynamic "joint problem space" is comprised of different conceptual artifacts and is both the target and result of the interactional work of groups engaged in problem-solving over time. How do co-participants achieve this?

The successful construction and maintenance of a joint problem space—the intersubjective space of interaction emerging from the active engagement of collectivities in problem solving—represents one of the central challenges of effective collaborative knowledge building and learning (Roschelle & Teasley, 1995; Stahl, 2006b; Suthers, 2005). Several CSCL studies have shown that it is the interactional manner in which this intersubjective problem space is created and use what determines the success of the collaborative learning experience (Barron, 2003; Dillenbourg et al., 1995) (Chi, 2000; Hausmann et al., 2004; Koschmann et al., 2005; Wegerif, 2006) . The challenge of maintaining a joint problem space is magnified when, as in many naturalistic settings, joint activity is dispersed over time (e.g. multi-session problem-solving engagements, long-term projects, etc.) and distributed across multiple collectivities (e.g. multiple teams, task forces, communities, etc.). As a result of these gaps, sustained collaborative learning in small virtual groups and online communities of learners requires that co-participants “bridge” multiple elements of their interactions continuously as they interact over time— a non trivial and possibly very consequential undertaking. As a result, it seems that an understanding of the interactional mechanisms associated with the overcoming of such gaps can advance our knowledge of how knowledge is built as a distributed or shared resource across participants and how do conceptual artifacts are re-used across collectivities and interactions over time.

The discontinuities emerging from multiples episodes of interaction and multiple participants and their relationship to collective knowledge work have been studied from a number of different perspecitves. The theory of knowledge building (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996), for instance, explores the progressive and communal nature of collective-knowledge development and the necessary conditions that allow communities to build knowledge successfully. The gaps that arise among events, perspectives, and people have also been an area of investigation in the study of individual and group creativity (e.g. Amabile, 1983; Sawyer, 2003) as well as in fields such as small-group research (Arrow et al., 2000; Bluedorn & Standifer, 2004), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and knowledge management (Greenberg & Roseman, 2003; Ishii et al., 1993). Despite their interest in this crucial topic, most studies have concentrated on characterizing the visible outcomes of groups and communities overcoming discontinuities and few descriptions have been offered of the mechanisms or methods that lead to such outcomes. Among these outcomes we can list the existence of “information bridgers” in group-to-group collaboration (Mark et al., 2003) , the use of boundary objects in interdisciplinary collaboration (Star, 1989) , and the emergence of “shifting epistemologies” (Bielaczyc & Blake, 2006) and an orientation to knowledge advancement in knowledge-building communities (Scardamalia, 2002). It remains as an open challenge to characterize how these outcomes are actually achieved interactionally or how participants overcome the discontinuities they find relevant to sustain their knowledge building. Here, we concentrate on this type of “bridging activity.” and attempt to describe some of the methods that participants of a particular online collaborative environment use.

More about additional research literature on the notion of bridging

Bridging in the Virtual Math Teams community: A case study

The Math Forum is an online math community, active since 1992. It promotes technology-mediated interactions among teachers of mathematics, students, mathematicians, staff members and other interested parties interested in learning, teaching, and doing mathematics. As the Math Forum community continues to evolve, the development of new forms of interaction becomes increasingly essential for sustaining and enriching the mechanisms of community participation available(Renninger & Shumar, 2002). As an example of these endeavors, the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) project at the Math Forum investigates the innovative use of online collaborative environments to support effective secondary mathematics learning in small groups (Stahl, 2005). The VMT project is an NSF-funded research program designed to investigate sustained collaborative problem solving in computer-supported environments and to characterize how members of the Math Forum’s community of learners constitute their interactions over time to foster their development as learners of mathematics. VMT implements a multidisciplinary approach to research and development that integrates the quantitative modeling of students’ online interactions, ethnographic and conversation analytical studies of collaborative problem solving, and an iterative process of software design.

Central to the VMT research program are the investigation of the nature and dynamics of group cognition (Stahl, 2006a) as well as the design of effective technological supports for quasi-synchronous small-group interactions. In addition, VMT investigates ways in which distributed, asynchronous interactions contribute to the development of an online community of people interested in mathematics. During the Spring of 2005, we conducted a pilot case study to explore issues of continuity and sustainability of collaborative knowledge building over time. In this design experiment, five virtual teams were formed with about four non-collocated upper middle-school and high-school students selected by volunteer teachers at different schools across the United States. The teams engaged in online math discussions for four hour-long sessions over a two-week period. They used the ConcertChat virtual room environment (Wessner et al., 2006) with new rooms provided for each one of the sessions so that participants did not have direct access to the persistent records of the interactions. In the first session, the teams were given a brief description of a non-traditional geometry environment: a grid-world where one could only move along the lines of a grid (Krause, 1986). The students were encouraged to generate and pursue their own questions about the grid world, such as questions about the shortest distance between two points in this world. In subsequent sessions, the teams were given feedback on their prior work and the work of other teams and were encouraged to continue their work or decide on new problems related to the grid world that they were interested in pursuing. Because of the sequential framing of the tasks provided and the continuous relevance of the properties of the grid world, we consider this a propitious setting for the investigation of members' methods related to continuity of knowledge building. The chats were facilitated by a member of our research project team. In each session, the facilitator welcomed students to the chat, introduced the task, and provided technical assistance regarding the special features of the collaboration environment. The facilitator did not actively participate in the team’s mathematical collaboration. More about the goals and settings of this case study.

Participation in the case study was voluntary in order to better resemble naturalistic interactions. This factor may have motivated the changes in team membership and variations in attendance recorded in our dataset. The variations in group composition were also propitious for the investigation of interactional continuity of the teams. In terms of attendance, two of the participating teams were highly stable (with 2 or more participants attending at least 3 of the 4 sessions), one was highly unstable and the others had mixed patterns of attendance. Figure 1 depicts the trajectory of participation and team composition of one of the teams in our case study (team five). Team five is particularly interesting for our purposes given the fact that for each intermediate session (excluding the first and last), there is at least one participant from the previous session and one newcomer joining the team (in two cases the newcomer was a transfer from another team as signaled by the dotted lines in the figure). Although we will use this team to illustrate most of our findings, even stable teams exhibited similar interactional processes.

The analysis presented in the following sections is aimed at understanding how teams of participants in the VMT online community “bridge” the apparent discontinuity of their interactions (e.g. multiple collaborative sessions, teams and tasks) and exploring the role that such bridging activity plays in their knowledge building over time. We employ the approach of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) to examine the sequences of events by using recordings and artifacts from the team sessions in order to describe the ways in which participants established their knowledge-building interactions over time. Ethnomethodology is a phenomenological approach to qualitative sociology which attempts to describe the methods that members of a culture use to accomplish what they do, such as carrying on conversations (Sacks, 1992), using information systems (Button, 1993; Button & Dourish, 1996) (Suchman, 1987) or doing mathematics (Livingston, 1986). As part of the phenomenological perspective, ethnomethodology is based on naturalistic inquiry to inductively and holistically understand human experience in context-specific settings (Patton, 1990). For our current purposes, we examined each of the 18 sessions recorded, paying special attention to the sequential unfolding of the four problem-solving episodes in which each team participated and also the ways that movement of participants across teams triggered bridging work. Constant comparison through different instances of bridging in the entire dataset led to our refinement of the structural elements that define bridging activity and their interactional relevance.

We define bridging here as interactional phenomena that cross over the boundaries of time, activities and collectivities. We expect this type of activity to be achieved through a set of methods used by participants to deal with the discontinuities relevant to their collective engagement. Bridging thereby might tie events at the local small-group unit of analysis to interactions at larger units of analysis (e.g. online communities, multi-team collectivities, etc.) as well as between the individual and small-group levels. Studying bridging may reveal linkages among group meaning-making efforts across collectivities or interactional episodes over time. In addition to the need to understand the interactional nature of bridging, there is also a crucial need to learn more about which aspects of the computer tools provided to support collaborative knowledge building attend to these types of activities, and how such designs might be enacted in particular contexts. In the remaining sections of this paper, we describe the nature of bridging activity in small groups and offer a preliminary characterization of ways in which bridging mechanisms might contribute to sustaining the collaborative knowledge building of small groups in the VMT online learning community.

Linking current tasks and prior activity: " last time, me and estrick came up that..."

The first step in our analysis consisted of examining in detail the second session of all of the five participating teams where one would expect the team to engage, if relevant, with re-using or revisiting prior work. This second session would be, for new participants the first time the encounter the mathematics of the “grid-world,” a world where one could only move along the lines of a rectangular grid. Figure 2 shows how the task was presented to the students in session 1.

Session two was then an opportunity for the work conducted during the first session to become relevant as they were asked to continue working on problems about this grid world. For example, in teams five's previous session, drago and estrick worked on exploring the grid-world and attempted to create a formula for the shortest distance between two points A and B. In session two, two days later, they are joined by two new team members; gdo —who had worked on this problem with another team once before— and mathwiz —who is new to the task and to the team—. At the beginning of the session, the moderator posted on the shared whiteboard a set of questions collected, in-between sessions, from the work of all the teams in session one and complemented with some additional questions added by the moderators. The team was instructed to continue their work by identifying and answer questions from the list which interested them, or to create new questions and work on them. The following was the list of questions presented:

Team Questions:
 1. What is the shortest path along the grid between the two points? 
 2. How many possible routes are there from point A to point B? 
 3. What is the maximum distance from point A to B if you can only travel on each POINT once? 
 4. How many ways are there to get from A to B in rectangle ABCD? 
 5. Make a right triangle with AB as the hypotenuse. What is the area of the circumscribed circle? 
 6. Can you go off the edge and come back somewhere else? 

Moderator Questions inspired in Teams work
 7. What is the shortest path along the grid between any two points A(x1, y1), B(x2, y2)? 
 8. How many shortest paths are there from A to B and how does this vary with changes 
   in the positioning of A relative to B? 
 9. Suppose the right and left edges of the grid are connected. 
   How does that change the distances between points? 

After the initial greetings, team five worked on question 6 but ends up abandoning it because they found it too complex. Then, they agreed to work on question 7. After exchanging some ideas about some features of the virtual meeting environment in which they are working, the following chat interaction takes place:

 302 	gdo:    now lets work on our prob (Points to Whiteboard) 
 303 	drago:  last time, me and estrick came up 
 304 	drago:  that 
 305 	gdo:    .... 
 306 	drago:  you always have to move a certain amount to the left/right 
                and a certain amount to the up/down 
 307 	gdo:    what? 
 308 	drago:  for the shortest path 
 309 	drago:  see 
 310 	drago:  since the problem last time 
 311 	drago:  stated that you couldn't move diagonally or through squares 
 312 	drago:  and that you had to stay on the grid 
 313 	gdo leaves the room
 314 	mathwiz: would you want to keep as close to the hypotenuse as possible? 
                  or does it actually work against you in this case? 
 315 	drago:  any way you go from point a to b (Points to line 314) 
 316 	gdo joins the room
 317 	drago:  is the same length as long as you take short routes 
 318 	gdo:    opps 
 319 	gdo:    internet problem 
 320 	gdo:    internet problem 
 321 	drago:  you always have to go the same ammount right, and 
                the same ammount down (Points to line 317) 
 322 	gdo:    ok   (Reference to line 314)   

This excerpt illustrates how the participants of this interaction chose to start an episode of joint activity and "task" themselves. They have started the work of recognizing and defining a problem out of the text of question seven. It is also easy to recognize that they are also engaged in using prior interactions as relevant resources in the definition of their current task or problem. This signals to us that a particular interactional method (a "members' method) might be in use to accomplish such specific work. A close examination of this passage—by attending to the ways that the participants demonstrably orient to the interaction moment-by-moment—can help us develop ideas about how this “bridging activity” is being accomplished.

Initially, we recognize gdo's posting in line 302 as an attempt to initiate some new activity (“now lets work on our prob”) which calls for the group to do some assessment or alignment work. Drago’s response in line 303 (“last time, me and estrick came up”) stands as an uptake of gdo's proposal in a unique way. The juxtaposition between these two postings indicates to us the beginnings of the group's particular orientation to the problem-solving task. The contrast of drago’s “last time” with gdo’s “now”, seems to constitute a particular kind of episodic continuity or “relevant history” for the team. By gdo responding to a call for present action with a report of prior action he has began to constitute prior doings (in which he and others participated) as relevant resources for working on their problem now. In addition, this sequence seems to position gdo and mathwiz as a distinct collectivity from estrick and drago, and opens up the possibility for these two collectivities to orient to each other as such (e.g. who should do assessment work and who should do explanation work). Finally, gdo is offering in line 306 a version of that work which he has begun to present as relevant: “you always have to move a certain amount to the left/right and a certain amount to the up/down”. The posting itself has the structure of a rule-like statement which is, in part, signaled by the use of "always". This posting also contrasts in its temporal orientation from those temporal indexicals presented so far in the interaction ("now" and "last time"). Finally, the posting includes a presentation of how one is to (always) move in the grid-world; something discovered by gdo and estrick in session one. With these sequences of postings, it is as if gdo has opened up a third temporal relevance, that of a generalized understanding of the grid-world which makes prior work not only particular to the past but applicable to their present activity (and possibly their future activity as well). Needless to say, this presentation doesn't make the reported past directly intelligeable to others and the work of assessing its intelligibility, its relevance and usefulness is something that the team has to engaged with subsequently, as a present matter.

This initial analysis suggests that bridging work that is part of collaborative problem-solving seems to combine three basic components: temporal or sequential organization of experience (e.g. what was done in a different episode of activity or at a different time), the management of participation (e.g. who was and was not involved in the reported work), and the projection of knowledge work as current relevant aspects of the interaction and the task at hand (e.g. what resources are relevant for the task at hand and how). In the subsequent moments of these excerpt we can see how these three elements continue to play a role.

TRIANGLE PIC HERE

The reply posted by gdo in line 307 (“what?”) and the subsequent elaboration attempted by drago suggest that the posting in 306 was taken as a problematical response to the proposal to initiate the problem-solving work. Perhaps additional work was necessary for line 306 to be fully sensible for the team. In the subsequent lines we can see the beginnings of an instance of the kind of interactional work necessary to constitute prior reported work as relevant and useful. Even without a thorough understanding of the mathematical task at stake, one can appreciate the fact that drago elaborates on his initial posting by providing additional task references (308, “for the shortest path”) and adding further references to elements of the past problem-solving activity (310-312, “since the problem last time stated that you couldn’t…”). In this way, drago continues to use a variety of resources to organize a potential starting point for the present problem-solving task of the team and, in doing so, he attempts to project that past history onto the current interaction and to make certain resources stand up as part of the joint problem space of the team.

The further unfolding of this interactional sequence starting with mathwiz’s posting in line 314 (“would you want to keep as close to the hypotenuse as possible? or does it actually work against you in this case?) continues the bridging activity opened up by drago in a unique way. Mathwiz’s posting suggests an active way of orienting towards drago’s presentation of how the grid-world had been found to work, while at the same time ratifying drago's position as the one who is to respond to assessments of his report (i.e. testing whether this case “works against you”). In this way, mathwiz’ posting seems to actively situate drago’s narrative of the past by ratifying its relevance for their current problem solving and assessing its practical comprehensibility. The presentation of a “test case” by mathwiz follows gdo’s presentation of a general rule in a way that signals the sustainability of the team’s knowledge building. It is precisely because of this type of engagement that we do not see this interaction simply as a peer explanation nor do we label the relationship between prior members of the team and newcomers as an entirely asymmetrical one of explainer–audience. This short sequence signals only the beginnings of the type of interactional work necessary to fully bridge prior knowledge work into present joint activity, and yet it is sufficient to provide us with significant evidence of the nuanced aspects of this type of activity. Other researchers have pointed out that the management of attention and knowledge proposals as well as the roles of the co-participants in establishing join attention are consequential for the collective achievements of small groups (Barron, 2000) (Stahl, 2006b). Here we see how these interactional processes are especially important for the establishment of continuity of knowledge building over time.

WE HAVE A STRUCTRE? IS THIS STRUCTURE SIGNIFICANT? Did other teams exhibit similar interactional patterns as part of their sessions? Where the methods used similar or different than the one analyzed so far? Can this bridging activity be related to qualitative aspects of their knowledge-building?

Bridging problem-solving perspectives: “…it's like, you can't walk in water, and the lines are dry lines …”

One further aspect of the second session of team five is worth exploring. The excerpt below follows the one from session two presented earlier and it allows us to observe how this collectivity dealt with the uptake of drago’s presentation of the past finding about short distances in the grid-world.

 323   drago: ok....
 324   drago: so
 325   gdo: square root of 45
 326   mathwiz: but you have to move on the grid lines, right?
 327   gdo: 3^2+6^2=c^2 right?   drago: no
 328   drago: you can't go diagonal
 329
 330   gdo: ok
 331   drago: the problem before said so, but you weren't here
 332   gdo: so the hypotenuse is not square root of 45?
 333   gdo: i was on team 2   drago: I mean
 334   drago: it is
 335
 336   gdo: but moved to team 5
 337   gdo: since u guys didn't have enough people
 338   drago: but, we can't move diagonally since that would be cutting through the grid
 339   mathwiz: the hypotenuse is fine, but for the problem, you have to go on the grid lines
 340   gdo: ok
 341   drago: so
 342   mathwiz: it's like, you can't walk in water, and the lines are dry lines
 323   drago: ok....    

Despite drago’s orientation to the recommencement of the prior work that he and estrick did before (and to a narrator-explainer framework of participation), gdo departs partially from that orientation in line 325 by making a solution proposal for the shortest path between the points they are currently examining (“square root of 45”). Consequently, the sequence of postings from 325 to 330 seems to indicate a local engagement with the problem as the present matter and no longer as a bridging move to re-use prior findings. However, in the sequence starting at line 331 drago uses, once again, elements of prior interactions (“the problem before said so but you weren’t here”) to address what appears to be a problem in gdo’s understanding (i.e. that you can’t go on the diagonal). This alternation between present and bridged resources for problem solving indicates a dynamic engagement by the group with its distributed history and its current problem-solving activity.

Also particularly interesting in this sequence are mathwiz’s postings in lines 339 and 342: “the hypotenuse is fine, but for the problem, you have to go on the grid lines…it's like, you can't walk in water, and the lines are dry lines.” These postings seem to do the unique work of ratifying gdo’s use of the hypotenuse —as well as his participation in the task— while at the same time offering him a new “rule” or perspective to manipulate the grid. It seems to us that this interactional move bears resemblance with the types of activities we have analyzed before and deserves the label of bridging work. By offering this new perspective on how to imagine and manipulate the grid, mathwiz identifies a boundary between different perspectives or forms of understanding (i.e. being able to use diagonals or not in the grid world) and goes beyond simply refuting it by offering a link or bridge between the two. This bridging of perspectives can naturally occur between different problem-solving episodes or collectivities but here we see it happening within the flow of a team’s interactions. With the dynamic changes in team membership that characterize naturalistic environments and the diversity of points of view among individuals and teams that are typical of online communities, sustained problem-solving work seems to require that co-participants also engage in this type of bridging of perspectives. Additional research is necessary to explore the range of resources produced by individuals and groups to overcome these types of perspectival boundaries which emerge as relevant during their interactions and which relate to overcoming challenges of continuity, coordination or affiliation. It is possible that the methods and processes of doing this kind of boundary work could characterize effective collaborative learning interactions, but this remains a notion to be investigated. So far, we have explored a few instances of bridging activity in the trajectory of a particular virtual math team in our experiment. In doing so, we have offered a preliminary analysis of how the collective engagement with past work is constituted across different interactions or episodes, how changes in the alignment of the participants signal various aspects of the sustained knowledge work of the teams, and how problem-solving perspectives are subject to bridging as well. Furthermore, our analysis seems to suggest that these attempts to establish continuity in collaborative problem solving involve the recognition and use of discontinuities or boundaries as resources for interaction (e.g. temporal or episodic discontinuity), changes in the participants’ relative positioning toward each other as a collectivity (e.g. narrators and interactive audience), and also the use of particular orientations towards specific knowledge resources (e.g., the problem statement, prior findings, what someone professes to know or remember, etc.). This initial analysis demonstrates that in interactional contexts where there are continual sequences of discrete problem-solving episodes and where the membership of a team might change over time, sustaining continuity of the team’s knowledge work becomes a particular challenge for which teams need to develop particular interactional strategies. In fact, the analysis of other instances of this type of activity could lead us to uncover a range of bridging mechanisms used as part of the teams’ engagement in this online learning community.

Authorship and the flow of ideas in collaborative knowledge building: “I remember that I proved this once but I forgot...”

In addition to following the prospective unfolding of the particular instance of a team’s recommencement, we can also investigate retrospectively drago’s “bridging posting” (306: “you always have to move a certain amount to the left/right and a certain amount to the up/down”). We could do this by analyzing his prior work with estrick a few days back and explore the genesis of the reported finding. This approach would allow us to stretch the scope of our analysis not only from one problem-solving episode into another but also from one particular collectivity (drago-estrick-gdo-mathwiz) into a different one (the dyad drago-estrick). In essence, line 306 in session two appears as a re-statement of something that drago and estrick discovered in the first session that they held as a team. The following excerpt illustrates how this idea was articulated then:

 168 	estrick: well, judging by my calculations, any root that does not go along a diagonal is the same length   
 169 	drago: it should be (Points to line 168) 
 170 	drago: except if you go some extra long way for no reason 
 171 	estrick: haha, precisely 
 172 	drago: but why are they the same? I remember that I proved this once but I forgot... 
 173 	estrick: because you will alsways have to go down and to the right the same amount of times 
 174 	drago: oh, seems reasonable (Points to line 173) 
 175 	drago: so...any more questions you can think of? 
 176 	estrick: but i am not sure of the correct proof 
 177 	drago: well...I guess its because whatever path you take, you will make tiriangles (Points to line176 

The relationship between line 173 in this excerpt of session one and line 306 of session two appears significant. On the one hand, the use of the adverb “always” in both postings seems to suggest a rule-like statement (or a conjecture) aimed at capturing a constructed understanding about the way the grid-world works (from the participants’ perscpective). The fact that the creator of this text changes from estrickm in session one to drago in session two could be taken as an indicator that this rule is a collaborative understanding achieved by the dyad which is, later on, projected into a new collectivity and a “bridged” problem-solving context. Based on this observation, we could construe the re-statement of prior findings and the change in authorship as indicators of sustainability in the co-construction of knowledge as the history of multiple teams in an online community evolves. Although not entirely conclusive, these two conditions certainly seem to point in that direction despite the fact that in small-group interactions the notion of authorship needs to be analyzed critically. For instance, if line173 is a response to line 172 and proceeds from the flow of the interaction, isn’t it really the dyad who should be credited with having produced the original rule about the grid-world? These kinds of interactions point to the need to carefully redefine the notion of authorship as we navigate individuals, small-groups and larger collectivities engaged in knowledge building. Beyond the apparent changes in authorship, it is interesting to note how drago’s text in line 306 of session two, differs from estrickm’s original posting from session one. Originally, there was only mention of moving “down and to the right,” but in drago’s restatement, one has to move a certain amount “to the left/right and a certain amount to the up/down.” Why has drago modified the original rule by adding the “/up” and “left/” elements? At this point, we need to mention that the environment in which these teams are interacting is much more complex than what is captured by the transcripts we have presented. In addition to the chat interface, a shared whiteboard is available to the participants in the virtual room provided. At the moment in session two when the exchanges that we have presented took place, the whiteboard in this team’s meeting room contains the picture in Figure 2. We can see in this snapshot the points that they selected to explore the grid-world and also some elements of how they have graphically presented their reasoning about it. Interestingly, a very similar diagram was used by estrick and drago in session one, as can be seen in Figure 3. However, in that case the diagram only included two points similar in their arrangement to points A and B in the diagram from session two. The arrangement of points used in session one matches estrick’s original rule that “you will always have to go down and to the right.” On Figure 2, there are two arrangement of points being considered: The one involving points A and B where the shortest path would be achieved by going down and to the right and another in which the movement would be up and to the right (linking the points labeled with circles). One can then read drago’s modification to the original rule as indication that he has adapted it to make it applicable to all arrangements of points based on the cases used by the team in this session.

Figure 2. Snapshot of Team 5’s whiteboard, Session 2.

Figure 3. Snapshot of Team 5’s whiteboard, Session 1

It is possible that drago realized this generalization via further individual work in between team sessions, or that the position on the grid of the points that the team has selected in session two provided the need for the generalization to happen. Whatever the actual motive, drago is presenting in session two a modified version of the finding previously constructed suited to the current circumstances. Beyond simply citing prior findings, drago has in fact bridged two problem-solving contexts in an attempt to construct continuity To further qualify this observation, we can contrast drago’s tentative reasoning for why the rule works presented in line177 of session one (well...I guess its because whatever path you take, you will make tiriangles) with the sense of confidence that his presentation conveys in session two. This subtle change could illustrate a change in the strength of his understanding of the grid-world. Observations like these, although requiring further verification through triangulation and further analyses, start to point to critical interactional aspects of how knowledge work is sustained over time and hint towards longitudinal aspects of collaborative learning interactions. Furthermore, they reveal the need to understand how bridging interactions span across the individual and the different collectivities involved in an online community.

Summary and conclusions

The analysis presented in the previous sections has defined bridging activity as the interactional overcoming of certain discontinuities relevant for the small groups engaged in collaborative knowledge building sustained over time. Three main elements appear as the structural components of bridging activity: temporal references, management of participation, and knowledge claims. These three elements provide for the structural relevance of bridging as a set of members’ methods to sustain the teams’ knowledge building over time. As we have presented it, bridging is not an individual undertaking but the concerted and situated achievement of collectivities.

Although we have used one particular team to guide our analysis, the systematic review of our dataset indicates that this type of bridging activity is highly pervasive. The changes in team membership and the sequential nature of the problem-solving episodes and tasks in our data provided a propitious setting for this type of activity in our experiment. Other factors may trigger bridging work as well. All teams in our experiment exhibited this orientation to continuity in different degrees but those that engaged in bridging work more actively were able to better overcome the instability of their membership and the sustainability of their problem-solving enterprise (as represented by the depth of exploration and number of problems attempted). This preliminary observation points to the consequential aspect of bridging work in long-term collaborative problem solving. Different degrees of success can be inferred across instances of bridging work, an aspect of this type of work that remains to be more fully investigated. Interestingly, bridging was also attempted by moderators when trying to inform teams of other teams’ work and provide feedback, but such attempts were often taken normatively by the teams resulting in a framework of participation that appears to be more driven by the authority of the moderators than by the self-directed agency of the team. In other cases, moderator-initiated bridging attempts appeared unsuccessful because the knowledge claims made were not perceived as appropriate by the teams resulting in no direct engagement with the alleged prior work being presented.

Our subsequent work has attempted to use an additional interactional space implemented through a Wiki in order to better support continuity and cross-team knowledge building with preliminary results indicating that such bridging spaces do in fact promote the continuity of knowledge building across teams by engaging them in activities such as exploring, testing, and advancing other teams’ ideas as well as projecting their own ideas towards future action. We expect these findings to help expand the scope of analyses of long-term collaborative interactions and enhance our understanding of collaborative knowledge building in naturalistic settings. In fact, in a recently proposed framework to assess the quality of collaborative processes in single-episode encounters (Spada et al., 2005), some of the proposed dimensions (e.g. “sustaining commitment,” “sustaining mutual understanding,” and “time management”) appear to be amenable to expansion in order to accommodate the long-term dynamics of cross-team collaboration. Finally, we would like to offer a few reflections regarding the collaboration supports used by the participants while engaged in the activities that we have presented. For the experimental design used, the virtual room that the teams used for each session was not available either to the same team nor to other teams who were working on the same problem (despite the potential usefulness of these cross-team interactions). However, even if these resources would have been made available, it seems to as as if special interfaces are needed so that “raw” recordings of interactions can be effectively used in promoting and supporting bridging work. The reappearance of findings across sessions of teamwork, expressed in text or through pictorial diagrams, could suggest that computational supports for the teams to annotate and mark their own resources for future work and for others to inspect them might be useful, but the structure of such resources needs to be carefully consider. The three elements of bridging work identified (temporal structure, management of participation, and knowledge claims) might provide a tentative framework for such annotation mechanisms. Further research is needed to develop our understanding of how continuity of collaborative knowledge work is achieved by multiple participants and how to translate such 8 knowledge into design principles. This theoretical and applied enterprise would contribute significantly to the pressing need to better understand how the power of virtual distributed teams and online communities can be harnessed to realize the potential of these new forms of interaction to generate and advance learning and knowledge in organizations, communities of interest, academic disciplines, societies, and other types of collectivity.

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