#642: Learning Across Levels: Conceptualizing Transitional Space

This paper conceptualizes Transitional Space as a framework for understanding how learning moves between individual and collective levels in CSCL. While prior research has revealed how groups construct shared meaning, how these collective advances become personally meaningful for individual learners is less articulated in a systematic way. Transitional Space reframes this relationship by conceptualizing learning as a relational movement in which collective knowledge construction and individually understanding continuously influence one another. The framework comprises two complementary facets: enacted Transitional Space capturing the interactional moments when group constructed ideas surpasses/below some members’ current understandings and supported Transitional Space highlighting the designable conditions that support these moments through tools, scaffolds, and structured activities. Two facets link the emergent and designed dimension of cross-level learning, emphasizing how Transitional Space makes visible and actionable the dynamic processes through which collective knowledge becomes individual sense-making, and how design supports these movements across levels.