Collaborative Learning in a Large Scale Computer Conferencing System

Computer conferencing systems have been used for the last ten years by educational institutions at all levels, sometimes as an informal medium, sometimes as complementary, sometimes even as the only mechanism for delivering education. However, few educational organisations have used conferencing intensively for activities such as information exchange, brainstorming, project coordination, problem solving, and decision making. These uses are, in general, far less structured than the ones normally found in formal education settings; however in most of these activities a form of individual as well as collective learning emerges in a natural form, in particular when there are a large number of participants in the conferencing system. This paper describes some of the learning processes that take place within TOOLS, a family of computer conferencing systems used within the world-wide IBM internal network, with particular reference to the largest of them, the IBMPC conferencing system.