The pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies 1

Collaborative technologies offer a range of new ways of supporting learning by enabling learners to share and exchange both ideas and their own digital products. This paper considers how best to exploit these opportunities from the perspective of learners' needs. New technologies invariably excite a creative explosion of new ideas for ways of doing teaching and learning, although the technologies themselves are rarely designed with teaching and learning in mind. To get the best from them for education we need to start with the requirements of education, in terms of both learners‘ and teachers‘ needs. The argument put forward in this paper is to use what we know about what it takes to learn, and build this into a pedagogical framework with which to challenge digital technologies to deliver a genuinely enhanced learning experience.