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Knowledge Building: Advancing the State of Community Knowledge

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International Handbook of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Part of the book series: Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Series ((CULS,volume 19))

Abstract

“Knowledge Building” may be understood as synonymous with “knowledge creation,” as that term is used in organizational science and innovation networks, amplified by a concern with educational benefit and well-being of participants, knowledge for public good, and complex systems conceptions of knowledge creation. Thus, knowledge-building classrooms and networks function in design mode, with “design thinking” as a basic mode of thought. Although one among many constructivist approaches, Knowledge Building is distinguished by an emphasis on advancing the state of community knowledge (comparable to advancing the “state of the art”) and on “epistemic agency”: students’ collective responsibility for idea improvement. Knowledge Forum technology is designed to support knowledge-creating discourse within and between communities and to provide feedback tools that students themselves can use in exercising epistemic agency. Pragmatic epistemological issues are discussed, including prescribed activity structures, external scripts, and conceptual and material artifacts, as these issues relate to self-organization and creative knowledge work.

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Further Readings

  • Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (2006). Education for the knowledge age: Design-centered models of teaching and instruction. In P. A. Alexander & P. H. Winne (Eds.), Handbook of educational psychology (2nd ed., pp. 695–713). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Provides a more in-depth treatment of certain conceptual issues raised in the present chapter: e.g., the nature of conceptual artifacts, the distinctive character of thinking in design mode, comparison of Knowledge Building to skills approaches to 21st century needs and to other constructivist approaches that aim to bring design thinking into mainline education.

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  • Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology. (2010). Special Issue on Knowledge Building. 36(1). Published online at http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/issue/view/1771. A collection of research articles and background papers showing the diversity of educational settings, from kindergarten to medical school, in which Knowledge Building is being developed and applied.

  • Resendes, M., Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C., Chen, B., & Halewood, C. (2015). Group-level formative feedback and metadiscourse. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 10(3), 309–336. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-015-9219-x. Original research on the effects of metadiscourse and feedback tools on Knowledge Building at the primary school level.

  • Smith, B. (Ed.). (2002). Liberal education in a knowledge society. Chicago, IL: Open Court. Papers, both critical and supportive, presented at an interdisciplinary conference on Knowledge Building as a 21st-century approach to liberal education. The book also contains the original formulation of 12 knowledge-building principles and a paper on “intentional cognition” that had a formative role leading up to the development of Knowledge Building theory and pedagogy.

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  • Tan, S. C., So, H. J., & Yeo, J. (Eds.). (2014). Knowledge creation in education. Singapore: Springer Science + Business Media. The identification of Knowledge Building with knowledge creation runs through most of the contributions to this volume, many of which are forward-looking, toward pedagogical and technological designs that more fully support knowledge creation by students. Commentaries by Timothy Koschmann and Peter Reimann view Knowledge Building/knowledge creation in a broader context of educational theory and philosophy 2014.

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  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Marlene Scardamalia & Carl Bereiter

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  1. Marlene Scardamalia
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Correspondence to Marlene Scardamalia .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany

    Ulrike Cress

  2. Language Technologies Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Carolyn Rosé

  3. Department of Administration Leadership, and Technology, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Alyssa Friend Wise

  4. Faculty of Informatics, Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu-shi, Shizuoka, Japan

    Jun Oshima

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Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C. (2021). Knowledge Building: Advancing the State of Community Knowledge. In: Cress, U., Rosé, C., Wise, A.F., Oshima, J. (eds) International Handbook of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Series, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65291-3_14

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