Groupware goes to school: adapting BSCW to the classroom

Groupware for cooperative work (CSCW) and for collaborative learning (CSCL) have many important commonalities as well as different requirements. By transforming a generic CSCW platform into an environment to support a particular vision of education as collaborative knowledge building, we discovered how functionality had to be adopted, transformed and refined to meet the specific educational social setting. By "taking groupware to school", we learned how to extend the original system into a CSCL application that could facilitate collaborative learning, knowledge building, perspective intertwining, knowledge negotiation, portfolio sharing and knowledge artifact production in active, structured virtual learning places. In this paper, we describe the resulting system and reflect on issues of design and implementation that differentiate our CSCL approach from its closely related CSCW basis.