Research on collaborative learning has revealed that peer-collaboration explanation activities facilitate reflection and metacognition and that establishing common ground and successful coordination are keys to realizing effective knowledge-sharing in collaborative learning tasks. Studies on computer-supported collaborative learning have…

New societal demands call for schools to train students' collaboration skills. However, research thus far has focused mainly on promoting collaboration to facilitate knowledge acquisition and has rarely provided insight into how to train students' collaboration skills. This study demonstrates the positive effects on the quality of students'…

Cognitive group awareness tools are a means to guide collaborative learning activities by providing knowledge-related information to the learners. While positive effects of such tools are firmly established, there is no consistency with regard to the awareness information used and a wide range of target concepts exist. However, attempts to compare…

Through close analyses of the interaction that takes place between students and facilitators, this study investigates the instructional use of video in post-simulation debriefings. The empirical material consists of recordings of 40 debriefings that took place after simulation-based training scenarios in health care education. During the…

Conversational agents that draw on the framework of academically productive talk (APT) have been lately shown to be effective in helping learners sustain productive forms of peer dialogue in diverse learning settings. Yet, literature suggests that more research is required on how learners respond to and benefit from such flexible agents in order…

This research explores the ability of grade 2 students to engage in productive discussion about the state of their knowledge building using group-level feedback tools to support their metadiscourse. Two aspects of knowledge work were common to the comparison and experimental classes: "Knowledge Building talk" (KB talk) involving…

The purpose of this paper is to show how a large group of students can work collaboratively in a synchronous way within the classroom using the cheapest possible technological support. Making use of the features of Single Display Groupware and of Multiple Mice we propose a computer-supported collaborative learning approach for big groups within…

The research field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) includes a large variety of approaches which present significant theoretical and methodological differences. This diversity complicates the articulation of the knowledge that is produced within this investigative framework. The paper addresses this problem from a dialectic…

This paper explores how wikis may be used to support primary education students' collaborative interaction and how such an interaction process can be characterised. The overall aim of this study is to analyse the collaborative processes of students working together in a wiki environment, in order to see how primary students can actively create a…

In upper tertiary educational programmes around the world, the new Web-mediated communication practices termed Web 2.0 are introduced as learning activities with the goal of facilitating learning through collaborative knowledge construction. The aim of this paper is to point to discrepancies in the views of learning, knowledge, and the goals of…

The purpose of the present paper is to examine the relations between Carl Bereiter's and Marlene Scardamalia's knowledge-building approach and social practices. It is argued that technology enhances learning through transformed social practices. In order to truly contribute to educational transformation, pedagogical approaches have to be embedded…

In an earlier study, we had tested if observing a collaboration model, or alternatively, following a collaboration script could improve students' subsequent collaboration in a computer-mediated setting and promote their knowledge of good collaboration. Both model and script showed positive effects. The current study was designed to further probe…

Prior research has highlighted the value of using wikis to support learning. This paper makes the case that the wiki has several properties that are particularly amenable for constructing applications that support the "collaborative" part of a variety and range of different time/different place student collaborations. In support of the argument,…

CSCL systems which follow the dual-interaction spaces paradigm support the synchronous construction and discussion of shared artifacts by distributed or colocated small groups of learners. The most recent generic dual-interaction space environments, either model based or component based, can be deeply customized by teachers for supporting…

Macro scripts structure collaborative learning and foster the emergence of knowledge-productive interactions such as argumentation, explanations and mutual regulation. We propose a pedagogical model for the designing of scripts and illustrate this model using three scripts. In brief, a script disturbs the natural convergence of a team and in doing…