Adding technological features in a collaborative environment makes it even more
difficult to specify the interactions between members of the group working
together. It is our experience that introducing technology into a setting can have
both predictable and unpredictable effects. For example ideas that are valid for
face-to-face environments may not work for online collaborative environments
even if they are synchronous, have chat, shared tools, etc. and the tools might
be used in unexpected ways (e.g. participants using only the first option of a
sentence opener in an online discussion tool and ignoring the meaning of that
opener). This is because using technologically mediated collaboration changes
the nature of the activity in ways we can not necessarily predict. To explore this,
researchers conducted work looking at situations where members of a problem
solving team are physically separated and then connected using computers and
visual communications technologies to work collaboratively (Scanlon 2011).
These studies helped to further understand the particular ways workspaces could
be designed to enhance collaboration. In this paper we will consider the
educational and social aspects of a collaborative learning environment and what
this implies for the design of collaborative learning enabled by technology.