E-Collaborative Knowledge Construction in Chat Environments

From the beginning chat was predominantly used for casual internet communication. In the meantime it has become a common and well-established form of communication also for serious purposes in educational as well as in business contexts. Among its advantages are its easy access, its low-tech affordances, high usability and fast and flexible communication processes. A variant of chat, SMS messaging, has met the public with unexpected popularity. Nevertheless, due to its media properties, chatbased communication frequently suffers from deficits due to incoherence of contributions, lack of coordination and problems of awareness concerning social awareness as well as awareness of context and available knowledge (Herring, 1999; Pimentel, Fuks, & Lucena, 2003). These restrictions of conventional chat-based communication pose severe problems for online knowledge construction and learning processes in collaborative settings (Jucks, Paechter, & Tatar, 2003). abstraCt