Technological affordances for productive multivocality in analysis

Productive multivocality in CSCL has been the focus of a series of workshops involving the comparison and contrasting of multiple analyses of the same datasets, with the goal of learning how different epistemologies and analysis methods of collaborative learning can complement each other and allow a more complete understanding to emerge. A prerequisite to such work is the technological ability to assist the comparison of different analyses. In this paper, we show how the Tatiana framework for manipulating analytic representations was used to compare three different analyses of a computer-mediated small group problem solving session. In particular, we draw conclusions as to the technological affordances that are needed to ensure productive multivocality and illustrate the immediate benefits provided by the Tatiana framework. Copyright © 2011 International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS).