Collaborate-it: A Tool for Promoting Knowledge Building in Face-to-face Collaborative Learning

Identifying how knowledge is created throughout the process of collaborative learning is of great importance to researchers and practitioners. We can, not only provide the necessary affordances for stimulating and fostering knowledge building (KB) in CSCL, but also highlight the processes and factors that affect KB either positively or negatively, which can be considered an important step toward enhancing KB in different CSCL settings. Based on previous studies, it was found that one of the major drawbacks of available CSCL tools is the lack of support to some of the knowledge-building phases that were proposed by Stahl. This paper presents Collaborate-it; a tool that takes into account Stahl's phases of knowledge building. The focus is on face-to-face scenarios as a first step, where other dimensions for collaboration will be considered in the future.