affordanCes for e-Collaborative knowledge ConstruCtion

The focus on knowledge has shifted during the last decades. Nowadays, lifelong learning and the ability to work with knowledge belong to the key skills of our society. This is reflected by authors using terms like knowledge society (e.g., Nonaka, 1994) or knowledge age (e.g., Bereiter, 2002). The quantity of information, which is generated and also accessible due to the new information and communication technologies, requires new strategies of information processing and exchange. It requires the individual as well as the society to keep their knowledge up to date, which results in a continuous process of knowledge generation (see Nonaka, 1994). In this way, it is not more enough to acquire knowledge and rely on it—learners find themselves in a permanent process of knowledge construction and rebuilding. Consequently, also learning scenarios have changed. Teaching cannot be seen anymore from the perspective of a teacher who is passing his or her knowledge to students and also learning cannot be seen any more as memorizing things presented by a teacher (see Ertl, Winkler & Mandl, 2007). Such kinds of learning would rather result in inert knowledge—knowledge which is reproducible for tests but not applicable by the learners (see Renkl, Mandl & Gruber, 1996).