The key idea of this book is that scientific and practical advances can be obtained if researchers working in multiple traditions – including traditions that have been assumed to be mutually incompatible – make a concerted and sustained effort to engage in dialogue with each other by comparing and contrasting their understandings of a given phenomenon and considering how these different understandings can either complement or mutually elaborate on each other. This key idea applies to many fields, particularly in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as education and computer science. The book shows how we have achieved this by presenting our analyses of collaborative learning during the course of a four-year project involving dozens of researchers in a series of five workshops. The 37 editors and authors involved in this project generally study collaborative learning, technology enhanced learning, and cooperative work, and share an interest in understanding group interactions, but approach this topic from a variety of disciplinary homes and theoretical and methodological traditions. The sustained dialogue across these multiple "voices" makes this book useful to researchers in many different fields and with diverse goals and agendas.
