The winners, announced on 23rd January, were:

Davinia Hernández Leo and Miguel L. Bote-Lorenzo (University of Valladolid, Spain) won the European Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) Award for the development of "Collage " and "GridCole".   In speaking about these two winning projects, and the importance of structuring collaboration, Davinia said, “Free collaboration doesn’t necessarily lead to learning outcomes, so we need to design processes that potentially illicit the desired interactions so that we reach educational learning objectives.”  To hear more of Davinia’s interview, click here .

Hans Christian Arnseth (ITU , University of Oslo, Norway) and Sten Ludvigsen (Intermedia , University of Oslo, Norway) won the European CSCL Award for Excellence in the Field of CSCL Research and/or Development for their paper "Approaching institutional context: Systemic versus dialogic research in CSCL." Hans Christian said in a recent interview about this research, “What we wanted to understand is why CSCL applications/tools fail or succeed in school settings.   Particularly when they are introduced into ordinary classrooms.  There is a lot research demonstrating that they don’t have any particular impact, at least not on a short timescale and we wanted to understand why.  Why is it that they don’t have impact, or why do they have impact when they succeed?”  To hear more of his interview, click here . 

A. Hannie Gijlers and Ton de Jong (University of Twente , Netherlands) won the European CSCL Award for Excellence in PhD Research for "Confronting Ideas in Collaborative Discovery Learning".  “Up until recently, scaffolds for inquiry learning were mainly aimed  at individual students,” explained Hannie in a recent interview, “We thought it was a good idea to investigate whether introducing collaboration into inquiry learning would result in higher learning gains.  But since collaboration is also a difficult process because you have to manage your conversation or chats with your peer students, we decided that it would be a good idea if we did some exploratory research.  We found out that collaboration also needed to be supported.”    To hear more of Hannie’s interview, click here .

Each winner received 1,000 Euro prize money. Commenting on the awards, Pierre Dillenbourg (Craft , EPFL) a well-known Swiss education researcher, and one of the initiators of the Alpine Rendezvous, said, “These awards represent the best in Computer Supported Collaborative learning. The standard of all researchers who entered the competition was very high. We hope that this award will grow to be recognised as representing excellence in not only our field of computer supported collaborative learning, but within education in general.”

Frank Fischer, from the University of Munich , Germany, leader of the CSCL Special Interest Group and co-organizer of the meeting, emphasized that both the meeting as well as the awards are meant to be sustainable outcomes of Kaleidoscope: “We are already planning the next Alpine Rendez-Vous, and the nomination procedure for the 2008 awards will soon be launched."


For information about the CSCL special interest group, see: http://cscl.noe-kaleidoscope.org/