Enhancing the social and cognitive benefits of digital tools and media

Abstract

While new media have greatly magnified people's opportunities for access to and sharing of knowledge and ideas and for forming social networks they have not performed so well as media for the collaborative production of new knowledge. In this symposium, researchers with experience in efforts to advance knowledge building apply insights they have gained to the question of how to enhance the socio-cognitive benefits of new media. We suggest development of a technological, social, cognitive and epistemic infrastructure for creative knowledge work. Toward this end we propose engaging teachers in design research along with researchers and subject-matter experts, enhancing students' ways of contributing to the pursuit of causal explanations, and introducing technological advances that provide greater support for high-level knowledge processes. We argue that teachers and students must be major players in the design and working of an infrastructure for creative knowledge work.