What is Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Technological artifacts such as computers and mobile electronic devices have dramatically increased our learning interactions with machines. Coupled with the increasingly different forms of collaborative learning situations, our contemporary learning environments have become more complex and interconnected in today’s information age. How do we understand the learning and collaborative processes in such environments? How do members receive, analyze, synthesize, and propagate information in crowded systems? How do we investigate the collaborative processes in an increasingly sophisticated learning environment? What is collaboration in the current technological age? This chapter, using the conceptual framework of distributed and social cognition, will seek to answer these questions. It will describe the current perspectives on social and distributed cognition in the context of learning, and examine how these theories can inform the processes of collaborative learning with computers. The chapter will conclude with implications to our learning environments today.