Constructing collaborative pedagogical situations in classrooms: a scenario and role based approach

Most CSCL works put forward the fact that learners working together would only need a means of communication. We feel this is not always sufficient. We have focussed on the collaborative activity itself and the way of enhancing collaboration. We have proposed a general framework which gives the teacher the possibility of defining and constructing pedagogical collaborative situations. It is based on regulation functions allowing the teacher to manage groups, to define the roles played by the participants in a group and to describe the way actions can be performed (by means of scenarios). This framework has been implemented as an independent software that can be plugged into any collaborative application. It has already been tested with a collaborative drawing software for young children.