Monthly Archives: July 2008

Quote to include

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‘collaboration should be recognised as a state of social engagement that, on any given occasion, is more or less active and more or less effectively resourced. So, collaborators may vary in their concern to create shared understandings; and their circumstances of joint activity may vary in how readily they permit such achievements to be brought off. The challenge is to discover how discourse is mobilised in the service of creating joint reference; to see how what is created gets used as a platform for futher exploration; and to see how the material conditions of problem-solving can be more or less friendly towards efforts after this mutuality.’

Crook, C. (1994). Computers and the collaborative experience of learning. London: Routledge. Page 225.

Referencing

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The next section of my thesis deals with ‘improvable objects’, an idea introduced in Wells’ book ‘Dialogic Inquiry’. Wells credits the idea to Bereiter and Scardamalia in 1996

‘This focus on an “improvable object,” as Bereiter and Scardmalia (1996) term it[…]’

so I go and read their chapter.

Can’t find the term. Well, Scardamalia is spelled wrong in the reference, so maybe the date’s wrong. If it’s a term introduced by  Bereiter, maybe he reuses it in his later book (2002). Nope. Maybe it’s in Bereiter and Scardamalia’s earlier book? Nope. Maybe it’s in one of their earlier articles? Nope.

So, naturally, I google it. And find that this blog is number one hit for “improvable object”. So not much help t/here. Lots of people cite Wells 1999 and Bereiter and Scardamalia 1996. Maybe I missed it? Then I find the 2002 book in Google books. It definitely doesn’t mention improvable objects. Finally I track down a downloadable PDF of the 1996 chapter and do a word search. No improvable objects, but only ‘improvable human constructions’ – in this case, mathematical ideas. I can see a strong connection between the two phrases, but they’re not the same.

I must have wasted about four hours on this. The original mis-phrasing of the reference was compounded by subsequent writers not bothering to check. Grrrr.