Over-scripting CSCL: The risks of blending collaborative learning with instructional design

Abstract. Free collaboration does not systematically produce learning. One way to enhance the effectiveness of collaborative learning is to structure interactions by engaging students in well-defined scripts. A collaboration script is a set of instructions prescribing how students should form groups, how they should interact and collaborate and how they should solve the problem. In computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), the script is reified in the interface of the learning environment. This contribution dismantles the concept of script. Syntactically, a script is sequence of phases and each phase can be described by five attributes. The grammatical combination of these elements may however produce…