Collaborative Learning in Software Development Teams

Recently Web 2.0 has emerged as a framework to study collaborative learning. Assessing learning in team projects is one mechanism used to improve teaching methodologies and tool support. Web 2.0 technologies enable automated assessment capabilities, leading to both rapid and incremental feedback. Such feedback can catch problems in time for pedagogic adjustment, to better guide students toward reaching learning objectives. Our courseware, SEREBRO, couples a social, tagging enabled, idea network with a range of modular toolkits, such as wikis, feeds and project management tools into a Web 2.0 environment for collaborating teams. In this paper, we first refine a set of published learning indicators into communication patterns that are facilitated in SEREBRO. We apply these indicators to student software development team discussions regarding their collaborative activities. We show how the refined patterns, captured by SEREBRO's Web 2.0 modules, are catalysts to the learning process involved in software development.