Learning to Learn and Work in Net-Based Teams: Supporting Emergent Collaboration with Visualization Tools

This chapter reports on research into the development and use of automatically generated visualizations to support teachers and students in net-based collaborative learning. Methods and tools are introduced that we developed to provide information about participation intensity and patterns as well as about structural aspects of the emerging group artifacts. Some of the visualizations are specific to the kinds of project-oriented learning typical for Higher Education, such as capstone projects in Computer Science, while others are more generic in nature and can be applied, for instance, to any form of collaborative writing task. We motivate our methods for providing mirroring and feedback information to teachers and students by an analysis of research on collaborative artifact production, in particular on collaborative writing with wikis, and by a review of methods for team-skills development. We also describe observations on student teams that engaged with our tools. The chapter ends with a discussion of how computational methods that focus on mirroring and feedback (formative assessment) can contribute to new forms of summative assessment, such as grading students’ collaborative work.