Webmaster
Amber Walraven

Project coordinator
Ton de Jong

Collaboration in Co-Lab

Co-Lab will support collaboration by offering joint experimentation spaces, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration whiteboards, and a broker service. Joint experimentation means that two or more learners can synchronously co-operate in a single experimentation space and jointly design an perform experiments.

Collaboration whiteboards will structure the synchronous and asynchronous discussion between learners and allow learners to bring together argument based on experiments performed and hypotheses stated about the domain investigated and arguments based on other sources, like literature, textbooks, and web resources.

The broker service will bring together learners who can collaborate on a certain topic. Collaboration only takes place when there are partners to collaborate with. The broker service will offer support for both synchronous as asynchronous collaboration. Synchronous brokering will take place by offering one or more web sites where learners can initiate a session and invite others to join, asynchronous brokering will be in the form of supporting and hosting sessions that can be searched by others interesting in participating

Advantages of collaboration

In modern views on learning, knowledge is not only personally constructed but also embedded in the social context of the learner. Knowledge construction ideally is a collaborative activity shared between learners.

Knowledge construction strongly benefits form the interaction between learners, because in this interaction learners has to make their thoughts explicit and elaborate on their ideas and knowledge in order to communicate about it with others. Communication with fellow learners has an added value on top of the presence of a teacher