Our analyses also showed that in order to understand collaborative learning we need to consider contextual aspects of the student discussion and see how tools/objects mediate learning in an environment where students' social, personal and cultural contexts are interwoven with the task in hand. In addition, our initial analyses in this study have shown that the reciprocal relationship among participants in an online discussion environment could be an important factor in enhancing the efficiency of joint knowledge building and other collaborative processes as shown by the high number of messages containing motivational and personal references. This approach to analysis of collaborative processes in web-based forums can be further enriched by additional data in the form of interviews or diaries so that interpretations are not only dependent on researcher's perspective.
In addition to content and interaction and task analysis, the context of the collaboration should also be taken into consideration in order to understand how different aspects of a situation mediate participants' learning. Guided by the discourse analysis work of Gee and Green (1998) and the interaction analysis work by Mercer et al (2009) this approach involves identifying objects and artifacts that are used during interaction such as referring to course materials or other resources and participants' cultural, personal and social experiences, prior knowledge and assumptions. Further analyses of these contextual aspects of the collaboration could be interesting but these are beyond the scope of this paper and we will pursue them in future work. We are interested in combining different aspects of collaborative learning research in a project that aims to explore variables that effect collaborative learning in an experimental study and explore innovative design possibilities at the same time. This may help to refine methodologies and approaches to analyzing interaction and collaborative learning in a group rather than focusing on individual learning.