Roles vs. Documents: From Product to Process Orientation

This paper presents an advancement in educating future scientists. University education normally has two major goals. The first one is to provide students with skills and knowledge to make their way in the higher levels of industry and administration. On the other hand and at least in Germany predominantly so, universities always educate future researchers, lecturers and scientists. We will show that from a constructivist position the main approaches to teaching scientific working are based on an inappropriate document-centered model. We present a role-centered model that suits the students' needs better and provides them with a more authentic environment when it comes to teaching scientific work in a virtual learning space. Furthermore, we will discuss how such a model impacts the design of CSCL environments and will introduce our current development in this area.