Resources for coordination in collaborative telelearning

We have analyzed data from a field study in collaborative telelearning (Wasson, 1999). The goal of the study was to investigate how the students used a set of groupware tools to coordinate learning activities. We have used concepts from collaborative telelearning and coordination mechanisms (Schmidt & Simone, 1996) as analytic framework. Our findings indicate that students coordinate many activities by implicit, locally adopted resources instead of fully developed mechanisms. Three implicit resources were identified and named (no initial discussion, asymmetry of knowledge, and different expectations). These resources were not associated with any specific groupware features, but referred to the students' background knowledge and subjective interpretation. We end the paper by suggesting how implicit resources in distributed learning environments can play a role similar to how non-verbal cues -- such as gesture and facial expression -- play a role in face-to-face interaction, but without imitating human body language.