In a study of online collaboration as an aid to foreign language instruction Warschauer
(1997) discussed the importance of students collaborating with each other and with
instructors to make educational leaps beyond what they would be able to do on their
own. Warschauer goes on to state that the asynchronous nature combined with the
written record permit collaboration of a type not possible in verbal conversations. In
this online collaboration, reflection and interaction are linked, a group can resolve
multiple ideas simultaneously, and improvements in conversational balance, equality
and consensus are possible.