GCP1: Open Collaboration in Formal Education

It is generally recognized that, although online collaboration between learners has the potential to contribute to learning, teachers and learners do not fully appropriate the potential of this sort of activity (Reeves et al. 2004). Many innovations within this area have been developed and used in a variety of situations, but the online collaboration is not often sustained and learners frequently engage in the collaborative activity only to the extent that is required by the task or activity they are set. Take up is lower than hoped for. At the same time, there is evidence that many learners use social networking tools in their everyday lives, and there is a question within this research area related to ways in which formal education can draw on the power of social networking in order to optimise online collaborative activity for learning. This contribution tries to identify the challenges for Technology Enhanced Learning in this context, based on the outcomes of a workshop that took place at the Third Alpine rendez-vous entitled "Structuring online collaboration through 3Ts: Task, Time and Teams".