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More than we realize it, knowledge is often constructed through interactions among people in small groups. The Internet, by allowing people to communicate globally in limitless combinations, has opened enormous opportunities for the creation of knowledge and understanding. A major barrier today is the poverty of adequate groupware. To design more powerful software that can facilitate the building of collaborative knowledge, we need to better understand the nature of group cognition — the processes whereby ideas are developed by small groups. We need to analyze interaction at both the individual and the group unit of analysis in order to understand the variety of processes that groupware should be supporting. This paper will look closely at an empirical example of an online group problem-solving experience and suggest implications for groupware design.

Learning takes place over long periods of time that are hard to study directly. Even the learning experience involved in solving a challenging math problem in a collaborative online setting can be spread across hundreds of brief postings during an hour or more. Such long-term interactions are constructed out of posting-level interactions, such as the strategic proposition of a next step. This paper identifies a pattern of exchange of postings that it terms math proposal adjacency pair, and describes its characteristics. Drawing on the methodology of conversation analysis, the paper adapts this approach to investigating mathematical problem-solving communication and to the computer-mediated circumstances of online chat. Math proposals and other interaction methods constitute the collaborative group as a working group, give direction to its problem solving and help to sustain its shared meaning making or group cognition. Groups sustain their online social and intellectual work by building up longer sequences of math proposals, other adjacency pairs and a variety of interaction methods. Experiences of collaboration and products of group cognition emerge over time.

CSCL experiment platform shall provide the collaborative learning activities and/or experiments with the necessary support, which obviously requires the platform to own remarkable flexibility. Mainly centering on the resources and/or tools, the existing CSCL system can only fit the collaborative learning activities in specific fields, but not those in other fields. The practices from the CSCL Experiments direct our attention to that an excellent support platform of collaborative learning shall be “flexible”. This paper focuses on how to build a “flexible” CSCL experiment platform, discussing the connotation of the “flexibility” and lunching a train of ideas and methods. CSCLEP, a project developed by adoption of these ideas, is introduced as well.

IT companies pay a lot of attentions to experience than before. Different from traditional education, IT training emphasizes the ability of problem-solving, design and project activities rather than concept knowledge. Accommodating themselves to new conditions, education organizations turn to the methodology of collaborative learning. In the paper, a self-controlled social-similar web-based platform CLP is provided for the training of persons satisfying the requirements from information industry.