"However one also might argue that "collaborative learning" is only a field of research and not really a theory or a pedagogical method. Collaborative learning ... "describes a situation in which particular forms of interaction among people are expected to occur, which would trigger learning mechanisms, but there is no guarantee that the expected interactions will actually occur" (Dillenbourg (1999:5):
Collaborative learning is not a method because of the low predictability of specific types of interactions. Basically, collaborative learning takes the form of instructions to subjects (e.g. "You have to work together"), a physical setting (e.g. "Team mates work on the same table") and other institutional constraints (e.g. "Each group member will receive the mark given to the group project"). Hence, the 'collaborative' situation is a kind of social contract, either between the peers or between the peers and the teacher (then it is a didactic contract). This contract specifies conditions under which some types of interactions may occur, there is no guarantee they will occur. For instance, the 'collaboration' contract implicitly implies that both learner contribute to the solution, but this is often not the case. Conversely, reciprocal tutoring (Palincsar and Brown, 1984) could be called 'a method', because subjects follow a scenario in which they have to perform particular types of interaction at particular times. (Dillenbourg (1999:5)
Collaborative Learning aims to facilitate that procedure by increasing our ability to collectively process novel information [2].
Collaborative Learning results in group members trying to successfully perform a certain learning task or solve a specific problem together, in the long run, as an instructional method, it is very important that all members of the group develop effective experience working together (i.e., domain-generalised group knowledge,[3] that facilitates every member in acquiring domain-specific knowledge from this combined effort. The use of collaborative learning has implications for extraneous cognitive load.
Collaborative Learning makes use of the borrowing and reorganizing principle and is one of the justifications for hypothesizing that collaboration can be effective for learning [1]. During collaborative learning, some information comes from collaborators rather than other sources and that information is likely to become available exactly when it is needed resulting in a decreased load and increased learning [4].
By having Multiple working memories working together on the same task, the effective capacity of the multiple working memories may be increased due to a collective working memory effect [5]. Collaborative learning aims to facilitate that procedure by increasing our ability to collectively process novel information [6].
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Collaborative learning has several roots
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Interest for collaborative learning sharply raised in the early nineties and soon became dominant in advanced educational technology research. At the same time other important focal points emerged, like interest for learning that occurs in informal settings (situated cognition and situated learning), communities of learning, etc. This is nicely illustrated in Pea (1995: 285):
More recent views of educational communication in terms of conceptual learning conversations (Pea, 1992, 1993), cooperative learning, cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newmann, 1989), communities of learning, (Brown & Campione, in press), knowledge-building communities (Scardamalia & Bereiter, in press), and learning as legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991) implicitly recognize the need for foregrounding a ritualistic view of communication. When they invoke the notion of learners participating in inquiries at the frontiers of knowledge in a filed an with mature communities of practitioners in a discipline, they endorse a view of communication for learning the I describe as transformative.