Experience With Teaching and Learning in Cooperative Knowledge Areas

Since the early 1990s, different infrastructures for supporting learning have been developed and practically tested in Paderborn. One of the key products of our research is the web-based cooperative open source system sTeam (sTeam stands for Structuring Information in Teams). The sTeam platform is both a subject of research and an instrument for practical everyday use. Students and teachers meet in virtual knowledge areas where they can actively deposit, jointly view, exchange and arrange documents. In addition, they can annotate each other’s documents and link them to one another and to external resources. Authorization features such as user groups and access rights support such open and cooperative handling of material. This article reports our experience with the use of virtual cooperative knowledge areas in different courses held at the University of Paderborn. The focus is on mechanisms for the self-administration of cooperative knowledge areas by learners and on various techniques for organizing them to support learning processes in both physical classroom situations and distance learning. Key areas of research include techniques allowing learning material to be annotated and organized by learners as well as the electronic submission of completed assignments and the provision of course material in knowledge areas. It is important here to find a suitable compromise between necessary prestructuring and potential selfstructuring of the knowledge space by the learners and to gradually accustom students to the new, unfamiliar scope offered by the webbased handling of material.