Collaboration – a tool for learning

We have just completed a two year CoLabs Socrates Minerva project. In it our goal was to explore collaboration as a tool for learning and exploit innovative features of Imagine Logo for developing microworlds in which children would cooperate, explore and create things – either working face to face or working at a distance, even across cultural and language borders. Such open collaboration, however, collides with different levels of barriers – from technical through linguistic to educational. We examined all of them and looked for ways how to remove, overcome or avoid them. We explored the educational potential of different forms of collaboration. We built dozens of small activities for developing personality, self-expression, communication skills and creativity of children, and also several complex environments (collaboratories) for joint authoring, joint discoveries in fractions and fractional relations and for visual modelling. We consider the potential of collaborative learning supported by modern constructionist software tools to be a kind of unclaimed treasure – still unrecognised and difficult to fit into traditional processes of teaching and learning.