Welcome to the Collaborative Learning wiki. This space was created for the Learning@School conference 2009.

We hope to investigate what Collaborative learning is within the context of Web 2.0 and provide you with an overview or starting point for where to start.

Here is an attempt to define what Collaborative learning is compared to Cooperative learning. The two concepts are different but at some point merge on a continuum. Quite often a project begins cooperatively and then evolves into collaborative learning as questions, connections and ideas are discovered.

Cooperative Learning	Collaborative Learning
Definition: Cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping teammates learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement.	Definition: "Collaborative learning is based on the idea that learning is a naturally social act in which the participants talk among themselves (Gerlach, 1994). It is through the talk that learning occurs."
each person is responsible for a portion of the work	participants work together to solve a problem
many times the teacher already knows the problem and solution students will be working towards	many times teacher does not have a pre-set notion of the problem or solution that students will be researching