Abstract

Helping students to engage in collaborative inquiry and work creatively with ideas is now a major educational goal. Despite widespread interest in inquiry learning and computer-supported learning, most schools continue to focus on surface forms of constructivist learning, with students busily engaged in gathering information from the Web and completing tasks (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003); for example, inquiry learning is often limited to predetermined goals, sequences of activities, and fixed standards that focus on skills rather than creating knowledge, which is the goal of real scientific inquiry (Chinn & Malhotra, 2002). Sustained and emergent inquiry that aims at knowledge creation, much valued in scientific and innovative communities, poses major challenges for theories and designs for collaborative learning.