Supporting Conversations

We use language and conversations in all aspects of our lives.

In our personal lives, we talk with others to gain information, intimacy or self-esteem. And in our working lives, we find our educational institutions and workplaces both filled with people interacting with each other and coordinating their activities through their "conversations".

These conversations can be seen to be more than just isolated collections of comments, conjectures and gossip. Information, influence and emotions can be transmitted throughout a community, institution or workplace. At their simplest they form chains of conversations.

For example, in an education institution, we can see two major kinds of conversations - those amongst researchers about how they view their interactions with the world through their experiments and theories - and those amongst students about how they are dealing with their comprehension of the course material.

The relationship between these two kinds of conversations is usually seen as a transmission of knowledge from researchers to the students via the educators. This traditional model of pedagogy sees researchers as the discoverers of knowledge and the students as empty vessels waiting to be filled with that knowledge. Knowledge as commodity. And it "flows" essentially one way.

However as we have begun to understand better how students learn (and indeed how researchers develop their own understandings) we see that conversations are essential to the development of meaning and understanding in individuals. And so the chain of conversation become more of a web - with knowledge and understanding developing within each individual at their own level of competence. The world is discovered anew in everyone.

And so, through the CoExplorer Project we hope to learn how best to support conversations about this big question.

And we hope to do this by conducting all kinds of conversations with a number of different groups:

• students (likely high school and college learners, working professionals),
• educators (including teachers, instructional designers and trainers), and
• and researchers (in a variety of biogeochemical, social science and humanities disciplines)

using a number of different mechanisms:

• Face-to-face (f2f) workshops, courses and conferences,
• Online workshops, courses and conferences,
• Blended (i.e., f2f with online) workshops, courses and conferences,
• Shared resources (including articles, presentations, datasets, images, remote sensing data, simulation models), and
• Collaborative tools (groupware, instant messaging/chat, discussion forums, shared whiteboards).