Despite extraordinary growth of interest in and developments of "virtual universities," "virtual classrooms," and "distance education," there is still a remarkable shortage of supports for online collaborative learning processes. Current efforts too often rely on teacher-centered, lecture-at-a-distance approaches, and a traditional information transmission model of learning. In contrast, recent research in the social and cognitive sciences highlights the ways in which project-based, active inquiries allow learners to collaboratively learn with local and distant peers, mentors, and guides (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). Community tools are technologies that foster these types of learning processes.
Three general classes of tools for online learning communities have been highlighted in the vision and work of our theme team. The first involves what we call Collaborative Representations—tools for supporting remote interactions mediated by diverse visualizations, notations, and models. Research has shown that Collaborative Representations are a critical enabling technology for successful learning about complex subject matter in mathematics and science. Collaborative Representations may include text, graphs, digital forms of student work products, mathematical notations, simulations, gestural depictions, annotations, and video. The core idea is that the external, symbolic representations of information and knowledge provide grounding for discussions, reflections, and learning conversations.
The second class of tools fosters new kinds of knowledge networking. These Network Improvement Tools have the potential to enhance learning by linking individuals to new sources of knowledge, to like-minded peers, to subject matter experts, or to teachers. Of the three sub-themes, this is the one that received the most direct research and development work from our theme team and the researchers we supported with CILT seed grant funding.
In this class of tools, we include (a) multi-user virtual environments (i.e., MUVEs, a.k.a. MUDs and MOOs); (b) community-based information filtering technologies, such as user-profiling and recommendation engines now used by Amazon.com; (c) "intelligent agents" emerging in business and scientific applications for carrying out activities within knowledge networks such as interest-based searches; and (d) "metadata" projects that foster efficient location and organization of learning materials by labeling them with categories that can be recognized with XML-compliant Web browsers.
Third, Scaffolding Tools employ pedagogical principles to structure educational activities, and thus enable more advanced performances than learners would be capable of without such supports. Learning is more than reading, writing, and arithmetic; it requires posing productive questions, seeking diverse viewpoints, creating argumentation, and reflective analysis and revisions of one's beliefs or works based on critique. Research in networked interactive learning environment projects such as Knowledge Forum, CoVis, and WISE illustrates the importance of scaffolding to guide students toward appropriate forms of learning activities and outcomes.
While acknowledging the value of these traditional scaffolding approaches to learning, our theme team emphasizes the need for significant innovation in this area. Specifically, we envision the field moving beyond the scaffolding of contributions and relationships, to tools that allow teachers and students to dynamically and reactively structure their history of interactions so as to maximize future learning opportunities. In the three pages (Collaborative Representations, Network Improvement Tools, and Scaffolding Tools) that are linked to this section we sketch out the direction for this advancement, and look forward to future work that brings to fruition these possibilities for learning.