Prototyping the Emergence of Collaborative Knowledge

E-learning growth is driven by global, societal, and technological changes that both enable and require increased worker and learner mobility, access to distributed domain expertise, and lifelong learning. Distance learning can deliver course value that cannot be provided in a classroom to trainers, workers, educators and learners. This study presents a prototype for analysis of how knowledge emerges during distributed team decision making. Analysis of ad hoc sharing of individual knowledge during synchronous online text-based group discourse demonstrates how reciprocal knowledge construction can enable emergence of shared understanding. The difficulty of evaluating collaborative knowledge construction in a virtual environment is demonstrated by presenting an annotated discourse episode for a distributed decision making task used to acquaint learners with the nature of virtual teamwork.