Roles, design, and the nature of CSCL Christopher Hoadley * Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University, 239 Greene Street East 309, New York, NY 10003, USA article info Article history: Available online 23 September 2009 Keywords: Roles Scripting CSCL Design-based research methods abstract In this article, I argue that roles are a key construct for CSCL that demonstrate the interdisciplinary strengths of CSCL as a field. CSCL is a problem-driven field with a history of incorporating different par- adigms, and has the advantage of using a design stance to understand phenomena like collaboration and learning that are difficult to study. Roles are understood differently by different disciplines, but the con- cept of roles serves as a boundary object between the different disciplines within CSCL and highlights potential areas for research. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction This special issue brings together a variety of articles on the nat- ure of roles in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), with a wide variety of perspectives ranging from the impact of scripted roles on student learning to emergent roles in naturalistic (not even explicitly ‘learning’) communities. The temptation is to arrange these articles on a continuum from those that assign roles (via scripts, or other means) and those that allow roles to be deter- mined by participants and study what emerges. However, casting this special issue as ‘should we script roles or not’ would do a great disservice to both the studies in the issue, and to the field as a whole. Roles are a key phenomenon not only in CSCL, and not only col- laborative learning, but in learning and in collaboration more gen- erally. Perhaps more importantly, roles help highlight what is unique and valuable about CSCL research and what it has to offer to other fields ranging from psychology and sociology, to educa- tion, to computer–human interface design. In the remainder of this commentary, the unique aspects of CSCL will be laid out, how roles and scripting fit into CSCL, and what this implies for other fields. 2. Characteristics of CSCL 2.1. CSCL as disciplinary crossroads The field of CSCL has existed for approximately 20 years. Like many other new fields of study, the emergence of CSCL can be identified with both an intellectual and a cultural history. The intellectual history of CSCL, like so many other nascent fields, stemmed from developments that suggested novel combinations of ideas that permitted new solutions to old problems, in this case using technology to structure collaboration and learning. The prob- lems of teaching and learning, and of collaboration, were old. What was new was the possibility that computers, and especially net- worked computers, could influence these processes. Like many problem-focused disciplines, CSCL did not neatly decompose into existing traditional disciplinary epistemologies. The problem itself could neither be called simply an engineering problem, nor a psy- chology problem, nor an education problem, nor an information design problem. Rather, CSCL attracted a variety of people from all of these disciplines who had interest in the application area. Evidence that this field was problem-driven rather than epistemol- ogy-driven can be seen in the debates over what the letters in CSCL stood for. While these days it is common to expand CSCL to com- puter-supported collaborative learning, one early book that helped define the field deliberately chose not to take a stand on the partic- ular terminology (Koschmann, 1996a, p. xi). The cultural history of CSCL is equally important in helping to define what CSCL is. Koschmann’s (1996b) initial statement of the field included an explicit contrast between the computer-aided instruction and intelligent tutoring approaches that took a ‘realist and absolutist’ approach to studying learning with the more situ- ated approaches that drew on communication theory, cultural the- ory, and more relativistic models of not only learning, but also of research itself. The juxtaposition of these perspectives is not un- ique and many fields from mass communications to curriculum de- sign have encountered these two styles of research. Yet, CSCL served as a crossroads in many ways, because although these ap- proaches were all included, there were also serious attempts to en- mesh them. For instance, Roschelle’s (1992) article on convergent conceptual change examined not only socio-cultural but also indi- vidual psychological understandings of what happens when some- one’s mind is changed by a conversation. Similarly, larger, 0747-5632/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2009.08.012 * Tel.: +1 212 9985395. E-mail address: CiHB-roles@tophe.net Computers in Human Behavior 26 (2010) 551–555 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers in Human Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh