Revisiting collaborative learning and CSCL in the age of social media

Research on collaboration and collaborative learning (CL) has a much longer history than ICT use for learning and collaboration. The emergence of CSCL has brought new possibilities and practices to CL, and facilitated advances in theories of socially constituted learning. The first CSCL tools were products from academic research, often underpinned by theories of collaborative learning. However, these research artefacts have a much lower uptake than commercially available digital communication tools. The latter are now overtaken by social media as the most likely technology mediating social communication and CSCL settings, if broadly defined. This symposium aims to (1) analyze the extent to which CSCL research has contributed to uses of different generations of digital technologies to support collaboration in formal education, (2) consider the affordances of social media for CSCL applications, and (3) explore the scalability potential of CSCL platforms as artefacts from research vs. commercial products and social media.