TONY CARR - ON IT! Collaborative Learning Online Blogs - CLOBS, Yes!

ONLINE COLLABORATION – READING THEORY THROUGH PRACTICE

BY: Tony Carr tcarr@ched.uct.ac.zaMaria Loopuyt mloopuyt@ched.uct.ac.zaGlenda Cox gcox@ched.uct.ac.za

Multimedia Education Group, Centre for Higher Education Development University of Cape Town

KEY WORDS:
Online collaboration, case studies, collaborative learning,communities of practice, mixed mode, discourse analysis.AbstractThis reflective review of some key areas of online collaboration theory will begrounded by examples from MEG projects which link the literature tooperational issues of design, facilitation and delivery. The paper deliberatelyopens more questions than it answers in areas such as online community,facilitation, communities of practice, virtual teams and the coding and analysisof online conversations.IntroductionThis paper arises from an internal MEG reading group on OnlineCollaboration and shares some of our experiences of interacting with theorybut will deliberately open more questions than it attempts to answer. Thereview will be grounded by examples from MEG projects which link theliterature to operational issues of design, facilitation and delivery. Reading theliterature of online collaboration through the lens of practice in our context atUniversity of Cape Town suggests a number of key questions including:

• What is the relevance of the literatures of online community anddistance education to a South African residential teaching university?
• How do the politics of facilitation manifest in online teachinginterventions?• What perspectives, skills and experiences support educators inteaching online?• How can technology be used to support collaborative learning?
• How may students benefit from simulated experiences in virtual teamsand online communities of practice?• What is the role of analysis of online conversations in teaching, staffdevelopment and research?

Our Context The Multimedia Education Group (MEG) at University of Cape Town “aims toresearch and harness the potential of interactive computer basedtechnologies and approaches (ICBTA) to support effective learning andteaching. Our work focuses on meeting the needs of South African studentsfrom diverse backgrounds, particularly those at the University of Cape Town.”

Many of our projects researched by MEG involve some element ofcollaborative learning both face to face and online in a variety of formsincluding collaborative filtering (eg The Images of Africa postgraduate course),negotiations within co-opetition (eg the International Trade Bargainingsimulation in Economics 3), project teams and communities of practice (eg theInternational Trade Bargaining simulation and the Ditsela course for tradeunion educators) and more conventional academic debate eg (Images ofAfrica and the DOH100F course in critical thinking and argumentation.)Online CollaborationOnline collaboration is more than online communication or even informationsharing because it assumes purposeful activity towards the achievement ofshared goals whether the outcome is produced by student groups or takes theform of individual projects. Thus online collaboration will include whole classand interest group discussions as well as discussions within project groups.Michael Schrage states that: " Communication is a necessary but notsufficient condition for collaboration. The key element, the key ingredient, thekey medium for successful and effective collaboration is the creation andmaintenance of a shared space. You cannot create shared understandingswithout shared space..". To generalise Bonk and King's (1998) description offive levels of use of the online environment we could classify our projectsaccording to the following: 1) Level One: Electronic Mail and DelayedMessaging Tools; 2) Level Two: Remote Access/Delayed Interaction includingfile sharing/transfer and asynchronous conferencing; 3) Level Three: RealTime Brainstorming and Text Conversation; 4) Level Four: Real TimeApplication Sharing and 5) Level Five: Real Time Multimedia Collaboration.Given bandwidth constraints our project are mostly limited to levels 1 to 3however Bonk and King’s schema classifies reliance on the technology ratherthan the level of the collaborative interaction.Literature of Online CollaborationThe theme of online collaboration is common to the overlapping literatures ofonline community, online writing, psychology of cyberspace, sociology ofcyberspace, computer supported collaborative work, computer supportedcollaborative learning, online communities of practice, knowledgemanagement, virtual teams and human-computer interface design. In definingresearch questions and processes we can draw on literature appropriate tothe context thus in the case of the Ditsela project the literatures of virtualteams and communities of practice will have some relevance while in the caseof Images of Africa the literatures of computer supported collaborativelearning and knowledge management may be more appropriate.Our attempts to analyse these projects require critical engagement with agrowing body of literature across several genres and domains includingfacilitation (Heron (1999), Berge (1995), Mason (1991)), online learning andteaching (Pattison-Gordon (1998?), Palloff and Pratt (1999), Salmon (2000)),online community (Rheingold (1994) and Turkle (1996)), computer supportedcollaborative learning (Bannon (1989), Dillenbourg (1999), McConnell (2000)and Warschauer (1997)), online collaborative work (Sproull and Kiesler(1995), communities of practice (Wenger (1998), Wenger and Snyder (2002)),virtual teams (Lipnack and Stamps (2000)) and the analysis of onlineconversations (Henri(1992), Kneser et al (2000), Mason (1992)).A number of relevant assertions emerge from this body of research including : 1) The online environment fosters fluidity and multiplicity of identity 2) Online communication is characterised by a narrowing of socialdifferences 3) Online communication can be used for shared reflective conversationsin communities of practice and in learning contexts 4) The social design is as important as the technological design as adeterminant of successful online collaboration. 5) Well designed knowledge sharing and knowledge management toolscan support online collaboration 6) Thoughtful choices need to be made concerning the balance of onlineand face to face communication and the balance of group andindividual communication 7) Effective facilitation and shared agreements concerning processcontribute to successful online collaborationRelevance to MEG contextMany of these assertions have assumed the status of generally acceptedtruths which can and should guide choices concerning project design andimplementation however some require careful examination otherwise there isa risk that an inaccurate understanding of our own projects may result from amistaken attempt to apply findings which have limited relevance to our work atUCT.One challenge in applying the body of existing theory to the research contextat MEG is that much of the literature makes inappropriate assumptions suchas:1) the primacy of communication at a significant physical distance.(Paradoxically Jessica Lipnak, an expert on virtual teams estimatedthat 75% of e-mail communication is between people who arelocated within 50 feet of each other.) The assumption ofconversations at a distance is in direct contrast to our situationwhere most online collaboration interventions are designed toenhance and extend a teaching and learning system based on faceto face interactions. Some of the more visionary assertionsconcerning the nature of online conversations need carefulexploration in our local context. 2) Much of the literature concerning online community and thepsychology and sociology of cyberspace emphasizes the fluidity ofidentity where participants are free to choose their own names andcreate and communicate new identities to their peers. In aresidential educational setting with most online interactions occuringin scheduled lab meetings the online identities are likely to beknown and the power dynamic between educators and students islikely to shape the communication especially where there is anassessment incentive for online postings. Thus in the case of theIndustry Research Project the role played by educators in an onlineprocess writing intervention became increasingly dominant as theproject continued. Nevertheless many evidence from many UCTbased projects involving online discussions and chats e.g. theTrade Bargaining Simulation and the Industry Research Projectsuggests that many students do communicate more freely in chatsand online discussions than they would in a face to face seminar.The Politics of FacilitationThe emerging literature of online facilitation draws copiously on the far olderliterature of face to face facilitation and indeed many of the most successfulonline facilitators draw on generic skills and experience in offline facilitation.Heron (1999) communicates a subtle understanding of the powerrelationships implicit in experiential groups and education. He describesfacilitation as “empowering participants to learn in an experiential group”which embodies interesting tensions within the power dynamics betweenfacilitator and participants. These get to be played out in the six dimensions ofplanning, meaning, confronting, feeling, structuring and valuing because ineach of these dimensions the facilitator can choose to act hierarchically orcooperatively or to “respect the total autonomy of the group”. These threepolitical modes of facilitation need sensitive and flexible management acrossthe dimensions of facilitation as the members of a group develop capacity forautonomous learning.Power can be exercised at many levels. At the most direct level the facilitatormay plan the entire learning process. At more subtle levels the facilitator may“decide whether to use direction, negotiation, delegation or a mixture, whenplanning”. Ultimately the facilitator’s political power rests at the level wherethey decide which decision mode to use in choosing a decision mode forplanning.Generally university educators are locked into the lowest levels of thishierarchy given that most planning decisions for undergraduate teachinginterventions are in made in an almost unashamedly directive mode howevereffective online collaboration requires the engagement of intendedparticipants if it is to deliver learning benefits. In the Trade BargainingSimulation the lecturers set up a system with inherent pressures andincentives which would drive the process of completely peer facilitated chats.This conveniently obscured the power relationship which was convenientlytransformed into interaction between WTO delegates and WTO officials. Inanother course a lecturer was unable to use his personal authority andexpertise to elicit the enthusiastic participation of class members in onlinediscussions. At a more subtle level our collaboration with overworkedlecturers operating at varying levels of understanding of the educational usesof technology requires facilitation of relationship where the MEG member hassome power as an expert but is often in a far less influential position in theuniversity hierarchy.Several questions emerge from the literature of facilitation and onlinecommunity building including:Why is facilitation relevant to educators?What are our sources of authority?How may we use our authority to both educate within specific disciplines andto foster the autonomy of our students?To what extent should we use course design to obscure our authority aseducators?What does it mean to facilitate online interactions in a primarily face to facecourse?Teaching OnlineThe literature of online teaching is mostly focused on pragmatic rather thanacademic issues. As is discussed in papers elsewhere in this conferencesuccessful online teaching requires educators to take brave yet wellconsidered steps in applying sound generic teaching and learning models tothe online environment. Unfortunately most of us grew up without theinteractivity of the World Wide Web and often launched careers as lecturerswith deficient models of teaching and learning. While the earlier offerings ononline teaching (eg Harisim (1997) were often either overoptimistic about theaffordances of the online medium for education or offered encouragingsurvivors guides to online facilitation (eg Berge (1995) more recent work bywriters such as Salmon (2000) and Paloff and Pratt (1999) is based onseveral years of experience with the new tools by educators who seem tounderstand some of the costs of failure.Salmon’s five step model of teaching and learning through ComputerMediated Communication was developed through her work with the OpenUniversity. In this approach students need to be guided through the stages of1) Access and motivation; 2) Online socialization; 3) Information exchange; 4)Knowledge construction and 5) Development. Salmon’s well publicized onlinetraining for e-moderators follows the same steps. While this model makesperfect sense in a distance learning institution we are fortunate if in aresidential university we can manage to support students with the first twostages the first time they encounter chat or online discussions in aneducational setting. Indeed we experience a mixture of levels of interactionsimultaneously as many students struggle to master the keyboard and a multiwindowedenvironment in their first year while a growing proportion withexposure to the Web either at home or at secondary school will bedemotivated if they cannot engage in meaningful discussion about the subjectat hand within 15 minutes after the start of an online interaction. One ofMEG’s more frightening projects is Newsframes which sometimes exposes upto eight hundred Humanities students to a multimedia tutorial and a simpleonline discussion environment early in the second semester of their first year.Perhaps we need to negotiate with the lecturer in charge of the AcademicDevelopment Programme (ADP) Computer Literacy Training to get onlinediscussions and chats on the agenda.Paloff and Pratt (1999) present a powerful vision of the process and benefitsof “learning communities in cyberspace” as well as the practical stepsrequired achieve gains such as learners involved in active construction ofknowledge and meaning within their courses. Their broad advice for onlinecollaborative learning includes:1. “Formulate a shared goal for learning”2. “Negotiate guidelines”3. “Use problems, interests and experiences as springboards for learning”4. “Facilitate dialogue as inquiry”5. “Facilitate Intergroup Collaboration”6. “Facilitate Resource Sharing”7. “Facilitate Collaborative Writing”Most of their principles are unproblematic from a pedagogical perspective yetmost educators in university settings while open to considering innovationhave limited training as educators and the politics of applying online learningcommunities may be difficult even in a distance education institution. My workwith a pioneering South African partnership between a university and a privatesector infrastructure provider to offer an online MBA warns me that soundideas soon come adrift when they meet determined if sometimes covertresistance within an institution and that the work of teaching online requires aparadigm shift in experienced face to face educators as well as somemeasure of technical reskilling. Our work in MEG values processes of learningcommunity and draws thoughtfully on a range of literature in this field howeverexperience across several projects has shown that effective learningcommunity online requires workable face to face learning community and thatonline learning community must be driven by powerful course design includingstrong intrinsic and assessment incentives for participation. Like theireducators students face ongoing choices about the most productive ways toinvest their energies.Some questions emerging from the literature include:How do we reconcile the paradox of lecturing directively and facilitating onlinelearning community?What clashes and fusions emerge when students bring previous experienceof the Internet to an online teaching intervention?How do lecturers deal with the fact that many students understand onlineenvironments far better than we do?What is the minimum training required for educators to make effective use ofonline environments in a primarily residential university?Working OnlineThe world of work is a powerful reference point for learning and a vital contextfor the development of social, intellectual and professional skills. We wouldcontend that many teaching interventions which succeed in facilitatingpowerful student engagement with learning are driven by recognisable(sometimes aspirational) metaphors which are consistent with the disciplinedomain and credible roles both in the broader world of employment and in thestudents’ desired professional settings. A number of MEG projects attempt tomake this connection including the projects in Film Media and Visual Studies,the Newsframes project which puts students in the editorial hotseat and theWriting for Engineers project where teams of engineering students work asconsultants design a technology intervention in a rural village.Two of the more compelling metaphors with a future but drawn from thecontemporary organisational world are communities of practice and virtualteams.Communities of PracticeCommunities of practice are increasingly being recognised as central toprofessional development, knowledge management and quality assurance.Wenger (1998) tells us that the four key elements of communities of practiceare: domain, practices, community and identity. COPs exist in a problematicrelationship with official organisational structures which could not exist without them but attempts to incorporate COPs within the official structures riskcrushing complex networks of rich informal learning conversations.Wenger and Snyder (2002) suggest 7 principles for the cultivation ofcommunities of practice:1) Design for evolution2) Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives 3) Invite different levels of participation 4) Develop both public and private community spaces5) Focus on value6) Combine familiarity and excitement7) Create a rhythm for the communityDi Mauro and Gal (1994) report on an early experiment in online team/community of practice. While they found that there was very limited reflectiveconversation among the members of the emerging COP this lead to a numberof recommendations for online teams and communities of practice. Undertechnological design they recommend protected workspaces for reflection,asynchronous conversations, chronological records of the conversation, and areadable and searchable text base for reference and collaborative research.Their recommendations for social design include structured dialogue startingwith personal accounts, linking action with reflection, reflective practiceinquiry, motivation to participate and extended time frames for conversations.Hara and Kling (2002) report on the use of IT among COPs of defencelawyers. The benefits of information exchange and mentorship using a listserve are clear but the authors wonder if the online communication is able tosupport the tacit aspects of a COP. They suggest that a move to the use ofvideo of court appearances may support richer learning. Another concernrelates to younger lawyers who without effective mentorship may acceptinformation uncritically and may not learn the rigorous research skills neededfor their profession.MEG projects which attempt to facilitate students in working as members ofcommunities of practice have had mixed results. In the Images of Africacourse students have for the most part engaged sporadically and ineffectivelyin online conversation with their peers despite the potential learning benefits.Maria Loopuyt suggests that postgraduate Humanities students have a veryindividualistic culture and that their sometimes idiosyncratic research interestsmean that their peers are unable to offer a learning community. Even inorganizational settings the community of practice is very rarely introduced inits pure form since goal directed individuals and groups are likely to besuspicious of a process which transcends short term goals and requiressharing of expertise and insight with no guarantee of either financial orpsychic recompense. The notion of the virtual team may offer a more usefulmetaphor in many contexts.Virtual TeamsLipnack and Stamps (2001) write about the affordances of the Internet forvirtual and semi-virtual organisations and how organisations can optimise thescope for improvements in efficiency and flexibility as well as cost reductionsthrough virtual teams.A virtual team is “a group of people who work interdependently with a sharedpurpose across space, time and organisation boundaries using technology”.Lipnack and Stamps suggest that virtual teaming becomes a reality as soonas people are physically located more than 50 feet from each other! Virtualteams often work across unit or organisational boundaries.Good virtual teams are “at their heart good teams”. A new model of virtualteams includes:1) People populating and leading teams at every level2) Purpose which holds the team together and focuses their work3) Links – “the channels, interactions and relationships that weave theliving fabric of a group unfolding over time”4) Time – this dominates virtual teams through “schedules, milestones,processes and life cycles”.This far more closely describes the project teams formed by students across arange of academic courses. Whether or not the analogy is fostered studentsincreasingly communicate by cellphone, SMS and e-mail across their socialand learning networks. A few of the courses researched and in some casesdesigned by MEG members have used the notion of virtual teams. In theTrade Bargaining simulation we see the paradox of a mostly co-located virtualteam engaged in chat and in sharing information through online discussions.The trade union educators in the Ditsela course facing issues of physicalaccess to technology, heavy workloads and union office politics made limiteduse of their e-mail list for collaboration while off campus yet neverthelessdescribed an improved sense of themselves as members of a learningcommunity. In cases such as the Industry Research Project in 2000 thenotion of the team was very firmly located in a shared physical space. Wehave learnt that effective virtual teams often need strong agreementsconcerning roles and process far more than they require access to the besttools of virtual collaboration.A number of questions spring to mind including:Where do we use the metaphors of COPs and when is the metaphor of thevirtual team lilely to be more helpful?What skills are the students expected to use and develop?How do these metaphors support or hinder learning within the formalcurriculum?How do these metaphors support or hinder learning within the tacitcurriculum?How can we capture evidence of the pedagogical benefits of virtual teams andcommunities of practice within our projects at a residential South Africanuniversity?Analysis of Online Learning ConversationsThe Online Collaboration Research Project at MEG has included thedevelopment and use of instruments for the analysis of online learninginteractions. In practice we have drawn on the literature of variousapproaches to coding and analysis of online conversations before choosing towork with Exchange Structure Analysis. Coding of online conversationsfacilitates research in several modes including course evaluation, mentorshipof lecturers and action research by lecturers and course designers.Presenting educators or students with the summary results of an analysedconversation may stimulate recall of experience and insight to providevaluable triangulation of the researcher’s provisional conclusions. In MEG wehave extended the process to include coding and analysis of face to facelearning conversations to explore the relationships between face to face andonline learning interactions.The analysis of online discussions and chats through the use of metrics ofonline interaction (Hall 2000) and through the coding of conversational moves(Mason 1992) is essential to this research. Work in this area is generallyfocused on the development of indicators which can facilitate insightsconcerning online teaching and learning including the power dynamicsbetween students and lecturers.There are also several highly sophisticated approaches to discourse analysisthat require considerable experience and subject specific knowledge for theireffective use. Some schemas attempt cognitive classification of educator orstudent moves (Henri 1992) but finegrained classifications (used byresearchers such as Newman et al 1996) limit inter-coder reliability.Cecez-Kecmanovic and Webb (2000) develop a communicative model ofcollaborative learning based on Habermas’ theory of communicative action.They reframe successful collaborative learning in terms of “the degree ofsatisfaction of ideal learning conditions.” Their analysis focuses on linguisticacts and on student orientation. Linguistic acts can be classified in terms ofknowledge domain according to whether they relate to the subject matter,“norms and rules governing the process of collaborative learning” or “personalexperiences, desires and feelings”. Student orientation can be classified interms of “orientation to learning”, orientation to achieving an end” andorientation to self-presentation”. The two schemas can be interwoven toderive a sophisticated understanding of both the knowledge domain oflinguistic acts and the role of the linguistic act in the collaborative constructionof meaning.New contexts and course objectives may require creative approaches tocoding and analysis. Lally (2001) and De Laat and Lally (2001) both presentattempts to use combinations of coding schema. Lally combines a modifiedversion of Henri’s schema to explore “individual cognitive and socialcontributions to an online seminar” with a method developed by Gunawadenaet al (1997) to analyse the “co-construction of knowledge in a collaborativeonline event”. De Laat and Lally continue to use a modified version of Henri’sschema to analyse learning processes and draw on work by Anderson andRourke et al (2000) to explore teaching processes such as design,organisation and facilitating discourse. The later schema is also applied tostudent turns in order to “gain greater insight into how professionalscollaborate successfully to develop their own practice.” This approachdemonstrates a strong integration between research objectives and analyticaltools however inter-coder reliability is still likely to present challenges.Faced with several highly sophisticated alternatives we needed an approachwhich could be applied by a capable graduate with limited discipline specificknowledge and some experience of online communication. While intercoderreliability would certainly be enhanced with fewer coding categoriessustainability was our main criterion.Exchange Structure Analysis (Kneser et al 2000) is a subset of the far largerDISCOUNT scheme (Pilkington 1999) and has been used to analyse therelative roles of students and educators in online learning conversations. Weare learning that a relatively simple coding of online conversation using ESAcan support a rich analysis when used in combination with data fromclassroom observations and educator and student interviews and surveys.Subsequently we have learnt about Fast Coding which is currently beingpiloted by Helen Chappel and colleagues in the UK. It may be marginallymore efficient than ESA and uses language which is likely to be intelligible toany educator with a background in educational or facilitation theory.Unfortunately most South African lecturers still lack such a background.Ultimately the development of a community of researchers working withsimilar approaches to coding across institutions and educational systems isvital to quality assurance. This work is still so fresh that we experience thefrightening phenomenon of finding our own articles and abstracts listed in thefirst 10 items on a Google search for “Exchange Structure Analysis”.Some relevant questions include:Can the method be used for quick and dirty coding for action research as wellas more precise coding for research papers?Who would be tasked with coding, analysis and reporting of results?What do we learn from coded conversations that we did not understandbefore?ConclusionEvery critical interaction with the diverse theories of online collaborationinfluences our provisional answers to practical questions of design,development and facilitation yet simultaneously opens several relatedquestions. In a unit such as MEG and a few others around South Africa it ispossible to pursue these discussions in a community of practice withcolleagues involved in projects with a range of objectives across variedcontexts. We have expertise and useful perspectives to share and couldsometimes do with other perspectives where we have blind spots aboutparticular processes and projects.Conferences such as this one provide a forum for national and sometimesinternational networking but on a day to day basis the community of practiceconversations tend to leap between the local (and sometimes regional) leveland the global level with very little happening in between. To this end I haveopened a space for online discussion between online collaboration and onlinelearning researchers based in Southern Africa and a small number of invitedguests from outside the region. It seems fitting to discuss online collaborationissues through the medium that we expect our students to use.

If you areinterested in joining these discussions please contact Tony Carr ontcarr@ched.uct.ac.zaReferencesBannon, L. (1989) Issues in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning,Available:http://www.ul.ie/~idc/library/papersreports/LiamBannon/12/LBMarat.htmlBerge, Z. (1995) The Role of the Online Instructor/Facilitator. Available:http://www.emoderators.com/moderators/teach_online.htmlBonk, C. J., & King, K. S. (Eds.). (1998). Electronic collaborators: Learnercenteredtechnologies for literacy, apprenticeship, and discourse. Mahwah,NJ: Erlbaum.Cecez-Kecmanovic, D., "A Critical Inquiry into Web-mediated CollaborativeLearning" in A.K. Aggarwal (ed.) Web-based Learning: Opportunities andChallenges, the IDEA Group Publishing, Hershey, PA. 2000.Chappel, H., McAteer, E., Harris, R., and Marsden, S. (2002) Fast Coding ofOn-line Learning Environments . Presented at Networked LearningConference 2002, University of Sheffield.Dillenbourg, P (1999) Introduction: What do you mean by “CollaborativeLearning”? in Collaborative Learning – Cognitive and ComputationalApproaches, Pergamon, AmsterdamDiMauro, V. and Gal, S. (1994) The use of telecommunications for reflectivediscourse of science teacher leaders. Available:http://www.terc.edu/papers/labnet/Articles/Reflective/reflective.htmlHarisisim, L. (1997) Interacting in Hyperspace. Paper presented at thePotential of the Web Conference. Available http://waldorfcccc.umuc.edu/ide/potentialweb97/harasim.htmlHenri, F. (1992) Computer Conferencing and Content Analysis. In A. R.Kaye (Ed.), Collaborative Learning Through Computer Conferencing: TheNajaden Papers (pp. 117-136). London:Springer-VerlagHeron, J. The Complete Facilitator's Handbook, London: Kogan Page, 1999Kneser, C., Pilkington, R., and Treasure-Jones, T. (2000) The Tutor's Role:An investigation into the power of Exchange Structure Analysis to identifydifferent roles in CMC seminars. International Journal of Artificial Intelligencein Education (2000), 12Lipnak, J. and Stamps, J.(2000) Virtual Teams - Reaching Across Space,Time and Organizations with Technology. New York:John Wiley and SonsMason, R. (1991) Moderating Educational Computer Conferencing. Available:http://www.emoderators.com/papers/mason.htmlMason, R. (1992) Evaluation Methodologies for Computer ConferencingApplications. In A. R. Kaye (Ed.), Collaborative Learning Through ComputerConferencing: The Najaden Papers (pp. 117-136). London:Springer-VerlagMcConnell, D. (2000) Implementing Computer Supported CollaborativeLearning, Kogan Page:LondonPalloff, R. and Pratt, K. (1999) Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace,Jossey-Bass:San FranciscoPattison-Gordon, L. (1998?) Electronic Collaboration: A Practical Guide forEducators. Available: Pattison-Gordon, L. (1998?) Electronic Collaboration: APractical Guide for Educators. Available:http://www.lab.brown.edu/ocsc/collaboration.guide/index.shtmlPereira, M (2001) Designing Collaboration, presented at the EuropeanConference on Educational Research, Lille 5-8 September 2001. Available:http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/~pereira/publicatRheingold, H. (1994) The virtual community. London:MinervaSalmon, G (2000) E-Moderating – The Key to Teaching and Learning Online,Kogan Page London Schrage,M. (undated) LEADINGLIGHTS:TECHNOLOGY DESIGNER MICHAEL SCHRAGE, Interview byKnowledge Inc, Available http://www.webcom.com/quantera/schrage.htmlSproull, L. and Kiesler, S (1995) Connections. London: MIT PressTolmie, A. (2001) Characteristics of on-line learning environments, presentedat the SCROLLA Symposium on Informing Practice in Networked Learning,Glasgow, 14 November 2001, Available:http://www.scrolla.ac.uk/papers/s1/tolmie_paper.htmlTurkle, S. (1995) Life on the screen. London:PhoenixWarschauer, M. (1997) Computer-Mediated Collaborative Learning: Theoryand Practice, Available: http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw/cmcl.htmlWenger, E (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity.New York:Cambridge University PressWenger, E. McDermott, R. and Snyder, W. (2002) Cultivating Communities ofPractice, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.