A CSCL Taxonomy Building Workshop

Call for Participation

Motivation

In recent years, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) has continued to expand in scope, methods, and theoretical foundations. While this diversity reflects the richness and vitality of the field, it also creates challenges for integration and cumulative knowledge building. Previous CSCL workshops have identified the need for a common language across the different domains that are present in the CSCL community. Particularly, the 2025 CSCL workshop participants have identified the need for a collective taxonomy and active community building in the CSCL field. In this workshop, we want to do both: build community by creating a collaboratively built CSCL taxonomy.

Workshop Goals

To build community, the workshop invites junior and senior researchers, as well as practitioners of all backgrounds practicing or researching CSCL. Participants can help strengthen the community’s identity by creating awareness of what constitutes CSCL in what could become a pioneering effort of research community building. Common and agreed-on language is key for complex, multidisciplinary fields like CSCL: This workshop engages its members in key collaborative processes: negotiate meaning and build common ground through the creation of a CSCL taxonomy. Such a flexible artefact of common language can have a major, positive impact on a variety of aspects in the community: improved journal and conference review processes, communication of expectations to authors, a foundation for tools to facilitate classification, comparison and synthesis of existing work, as well as a support for collaborations within and outside the CSCL community.  In addition, the process of developing such a taxonomy itself constitutes an effort of community building, thereby also serving the first goal of community building. In summary, by collaboratively developing and evaluating such a taxonomy, supported by a broad proportion of the CSCL community, the workshop seeks to lay the foundation for a more connected and integrated future for CSCL research.

Workshop Agenda

This workshop is designed for lasting impact and community building. This means that the workshop includes activities ahead and beyond the onsite workshop.

Pre-workshop: Drafting a taxonomy

The organizers will invite a panel of experts to design an initial draft version of a CSCL taxonomy ahead of the workshop. Three weeks prior to the conference, participants will be invited to revise and provide anonymous feedback on this draft. Integrating participants’ input, workshop organizers will prepare the next version of the taxonomy for the conference workshop.

Conference workshop: Refining the taxonomy

During the workshop, participants will engage in two rounds of refinement of the taxonomy draft. First, they will apply the taxonomy to one of their own papers (or a default paper as fallback), discuss their application experience and the parts of the taxonomy they think should change. Second, participants will work in groups on specific parts of the taxonomy and an action plan to sustain this community effort.

Post-workshop: Follow-up activities

After the workshop, we will invite the participants and the broader CSCL community to comment on the latest version of the taxonomy to finalize it and to collaborate on its implementation. The participants are also invited to contribute to the documentation of the workshop and its results in the form of a brief report (for IJCSCL) and the application of the taxonomy by conducting a systematic review.

Who should attend

This half-day workshop is intended for all researchers and educators interested and engaged in CSCL, as well as its related domains, including but not limited to: educational psychologists, computer scientists and learning scientists. We particularly welcome researchers from all domains to contribute their vision of computer-supported collaborative learning, with a minimum of 8 to a maximum of 40 participants. We can manage up to 30 in-person participants, with the remaining ten slots for online attendants.

Organizers

• Martin Greisel

• Burcu Şener

• Sebastian Simon

• Conrad Borchers

• Elham Tajik

• Bahar Shahrokhian

• Xiao Hu