Crafting Human-material Collaborative Learning Processes and Technology Advances

Computer supported collaborative learning has a history of investigating learning processes between people and the technological materials that support them. Emergent posthumanist perspectives view technology as actively produced through routinized actions by humans and non-human materials. Applied to CSCL, this view would suggest that materials are active participants. The present inquiry explores materials that are historically connected to technology advancements–fiber crafts–to investigate material collaborative learning processes and the kind of learning they produce. Findings present material-collaborative learning processes that show crafters collaborate with materials to produce physical evidence of learning, i.e., craft-technology advances. This work has implications for theorizing and designing for collaborative learning, expanding who and what can be considered a participant.