Principles and grand challenges for the future: a prospectus for the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) community

Six principles of future learning environments have emerged from the CSCL research community. These include: greater “sightlines” into learner, teacher and peer cognition; an increasingly salient role for modeling; increased connectivity between people, concurrent with a greater sense of individualization or “one-to-oneness”; fluid contextual mobility in learning, such as between virtual and real contexts or interoperability of individual, social and machine knowledge forms; and higher interactional bandwidth, or capacity of the environment to mediate meaningful content. Four grand challenges – large, worthy, and difficult tasks should occupy the attention of the CSCL community. Each is a frontier: a more visible and vibrant role for the tools and metaphors of the CSCL community in a troubled era of globalization; means for extending collaboration beyond cognitive models to a broader range of human experience; vitality in learning and collaboration through the life cycle; and unlocking group “flow” in the science of collaboration.