About Collaborative e-Learning

By definition, collaborative e-learning activities imply that participants perform their work together with other individuals, i.e., other participants, tutors, and teachers. Although there is significant empirical evidence that the cognitive processes that are necessary for learning and knowledge construction occur in social interaction, and that " collaborative learning " is the " royal road " to knowledge acquisition, putting two or more people in the same context is not a warranty neither that they will be able to collaborate, nor that they will be able to learn. From the very beginning of research in social psychology (Triplett, 1897) it is well established that the mere presence of another is enough to modify the way an individual works, and a huge amount of empirical results have been collected: facilitation, competition, collaboration, group dynamics are only few examples of notions put forward for understanding the variety of phenomena documented; some of them if favor of beneficial effects, other against naïve interpretations that two people are better than one. As in many other phenomena both in everyday life and science, on-off interpretations are misleading if not wrong. At the same time of the beginning of 20 century, the cultural historical approach to development and learning was proposed. it is not room today for discussing the vicissitudes the how and why this approach became for decades a part of what I propose to mention as the underground psychology, like the geological phenomenon of karst for rivers. Puzzling enough since the seventies, psychology blossoms with a huge amount of notions and metaphors, referring to cognition and learning as a construction, social construction, participation, situated, collaborative. At the same time, computer becomes not only a metaphor for cool /cold cognition, but also a partner, a mediator, artifact, tool, and so on. One could wonder whether the mirror effect between computer/mind (or cognition) in computer science and artificial intelligence and between computer /human being in other domains of psychology is a way of exemplifying the effort scholars witness for trying to operationalize the study of influence of various artifacts on learning. Both computer/internet and a peer (a tutor, a teacher) should be conceived as partners, as the Other: Thus the presence of other people in the same situation, even in absence of any kind of communication, is per se a factor that leads to focalization of the subject (student) on the interpretation of situation (the meaning of …