There is much positive research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments in asynchronous distributed learning groups (DLGs). There is also research that shows that contemporary CSCL environments do not completely fulfil expectations on supporting interactive group learning, shared understanding, social construction of knowledge, and acquisition of competencies. There appear to be two major pitfalls impeding achievement of the desired social interaction in CSCL environments: taking social interaction in groups for granted and the lack of attention paid to the social psychological dimension of social interaction outside of the task context. Current solutions offered to avoid the pitfalls placed responsibility on instructors and teachers to encourage collaborative learning and social interaction. To both free educators from this burden and be more cost effective, we propose an intelligent CSCL environment. The environment is based upon a theoretical framework that suggests embedding certain properties in the environment to act as social contextual facilitators- social affordances- to initiate and sustain learner’s social interactions. Finally, a group awareness widget (GAW)- a software tool providing the learner group awareness about the others in the task and in the non-task context- is introduced as an embodiment of this theoretical framework.

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The views expressed are those of the author and should not be taken as being those of the Scottish Council for Research in Education or of the Scottish Office which commissioned the review.

Video-conferencing is expected to become increasingly important for tele-learning environments. In contrast to asynchronous, text-based computer-mediated communication, video-conferencing facilitates cooperation tasks that require highly frequent and continuous coordination. Typical kinds of such cooperation tasks are found in peer teaching settings. Despite the growing application of videoconferencing, only little is known about possibilities of enhancing collaboration in video-conferencing settings. This study investigates the effects of different types of support for cooperation on the learning outcomes of peer dyads in a video-conferencing scenario. The main research question is how cooperation scripts and content schemes enhance the students' cognitive activities and foster the outcomes of cooperative learning. Two factors were varied experimentally: The content scheme (with/without) and the cooperation script (with/without). 86 university students of educational psychology participated in the study. Each student of a dyad received a text dealing with a psychological theory in the field of the nature-nurture-debate. The students' tasks were (1) to teach their partners the relevant contents of their text and (2) to reflect ideas that went beyond the scope of the text. Results indicate that in particular the cooperation script enhances learning outcomes of collaborative knowledge construction.

Unravelling basic componets and dimensions of powerful learning environments. Elsevier.

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The goals of this study are to evaluate a relatively novel learning environment, as well as to seek greater understanding of why human tutoring is so effective. This alternative learning environment consists of pairs of students collaboratively observing a videotape of another student being tutored. Comparing this collaboratively observing environment to four other instructional methods – one-on-one human tutoring, observing tutoring individually, collaborating without observing, and studying alone – the results showed that students learned to solve physics problems just as effectively from observing tutoring collaboratively as the tutees who were being tutored individually. We explain the effectiveness of this learning environment by postulating that such a situation encourages learners to become active and constructive observers through interactions with a peer. In essence, collaboratively observing combines the benefit of tutoring with the benefit of collaborating. The learning outcomes of the tutees and the collaborative observers, along with the tutoring dialogues, were used to further evaluate three hypotheses explaining why human tutoring is an effective learning method. Detailed analyses of the protocols at several grain sizes suggest that tutoring is effective when tutees are independently or jointly constructing knowledge with the tutor, but not when the tutor independently conveys knowledge.

a particular challenge, the aim of the current study was to explore the benefit of additionally situating this cooperation in a real-world context through further specific instructions. This situatedness of the cooperation in the DSA was realised by instructing the students to set up their own start-up company and therefore to divide the workload according to particular real-world occupational roles (e.g. system administrator, customer consulting, etc). The experimental question was whether and, if so, how this situated cooperation affects the learning process (i.e. learners' satisfaction, topic relevance perception, motivation, communication and cooperation) as well as the learning efficiency in addition to the realworld, problem-based task. Thus, half of the work teams received this situated cooperation instruction in addition to the problem-based task instruction and half did not and therefore only received the problem-based task instruction. Moreover, the role of the two diffe

Abstract: Collaboration is an important problem-solving skill; however, novice collaboration generally benefits from some kind of support. One possibility for supporting productive conversations between collaborators is to encourage pairs of students to provide explanations for their problem-solving steps. To test this possibility, we contrasted individuals who were instructed to self-explain problem-solving steps with dyads who were instructed to jointly explain problem-solving steps in the context of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). The results suggest that collaboratively developed explanations prompted students to remediate their errors in dialog, as opposed to relying on the ITS for assistance, which is provided in the form of on-demand hints. The paper concludes with a discussion about implications for combining proven learning interventions.