Collaborative knowledge building using the Design Principles Database

In this study we describe a mechanism for supporting a community of learning scientists who are exploring educational technologies by helping them to share and collaboratively build design knowledge. The Design Principles Database (DPD) is intended to be built and used by this community to provide an infrastructure for participants to publish, connect, discuss and review design ideas, and to use these ideas to create new designs. The potential of the DPD to serve as a collaborative knowledge-building endeavor is illustrated by analysis of a CSCL study focused on peer-evaluation. The analysis demonstrates how the DPD was used by the researchers of the peer-evaluation study in three phases. In the first phase, design principles were articulated based on a literature review and contributed to the DPD. In the second phase, a peer-evaluation activity was designed based on these principles, and was enacted and revised in a three-iteration study. In the third phase, lessons learned through these iterations were fed back to the DPD. The analysis indicates that such processes can contribute to collaborative development of design knowledge in a community of the learning sciences. Readers of ijCSCL are invited to take part in this endeavor and share their design knowledge with the community.