What do you mean by ‘collaborative learning’? –continued
\cite{Dillenbourg99}

Collaboration concern 4 aspects: (1) A situation between people, (2) the interactions which take place between the group members, (3) some learning mechanisms; (d) effects of collaborative learning. Some introduced vocabulary comprehend: (a) symmetry/and asymmetry; (b) grounding; (c) induction; (d) mutual modelling; (e) horizontal division/vertical division. Part of the CSCL theory is about how people establish common goals or how them split tasks. The difference between cooperation and collaboration is that in cooperation partners split the work, solve the sub-tasks individually and then reassemble the partial results into the final output. In collaboration partners do the work ‘together’. The author also defines some criteria for defining a situation as collaborative: (a) interactivity is not defined by the frequency but by the extent to which these interactions influence the peers’ cognitive processes; (b) synchronous communication; (c) negotiability. Four processes are characterised as collaborative: (a) induction (pairs draw more abstract representations of the problem at hand); (b) cognitive load; (c) Self-explanation, (d) Conflict . The author ask the question: are there learning processes which are specific of the group? The effect of collaborative learning are often assessed by individual task performance measures.

Collaboration can be defined as (\cite{Roschelle95}): a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem.

There is reciprocal causality in most situations concerning collaborative learning:
-there is a bidirectional link between the situation and the interactions
-there is a bidirectional link between the interactions and the processes and between processes and effects