From mirroring to guiding

 State of the art research and development on online collaborative technologies. An excellent recent summary:

We review a representative selection of systems that support the management of collaborative
learning interaction, and characterize them within a simple classification framework. The framework
distinguishes between mirroring systems, which display basic actions to collaborators, metacognitive
tools, which represent the state of interaction via a set of key indicators, and coaching systems, which
offer advice based on an interpretation of those indicators. The reviewed systems are further characterized
by the type of interaction data they assimilate, the processes they use for deriving higher-level data
representations, the variables or indicators that characterize these representations, and the type of
feedback they provide to students and teachers. This overview of technological capabilities is designed to
lay the groundwork for further research into which technological solutions are appropriate for which
learning situations.

 

 

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/19/73/78/PDF/Soller-Amy-2005.pdf