Chapter 9: Collaborative Learning Environments Across the Internet

Telecollaboration is a form of collaborative education that permits students and instructors to make scholarly and personal connections across distance. These collaborations facilitate learning through an online classroom or via teleconferencing by sharing in-class activities, findings, perspectives, and perceptions between instructors and students. The case study presented in this chapter documents the experiences of two university social studies education classes as they collaborate through videoconferencing. The findings from this case are translated into guidelines for the application of telecollaborative education with implications for teaching and learning in K-12 or higher education.

A new type of social studies classroom is under development. This classroom has four walls, yet one of the walls is shared with a classroom in a geographically disparate location. This “virtual wall,” however, is a mirror image of a second room, reflecting a class in another location a thousand miles away. The two classes and two instructors are linked via a videoconferencing system and an electronic white board. A collaboration forms between the instructors and students, and the essence of social studies teaching and learning is enhanced by expanding the “walls” and broadening the perspectives captured in course discussions.