This paper reports on how we designed a CSCL system by transforming a CSCW system.

Groupware for cooperative work (CSCW) and for collaborative learning (CSCL) have many important commonalities as well as different requirements. By transforming a generic CSCW platform into an environment to support a particular vision of education as collaborative knowledge building, we saw how functionality had to be adopted, transformed and refined to meet the specific educational social setting. By “taking groupware to school,” we discovered the need to extend the original system into a CSCL application that could facilitate collaborative learning, knowledge building, perspective intertwining, knowledge negotiation, portfolio sharing and knowledge artifacts in active, structured virtual learning places. In the paper, we describe the resulting system and reflect on issues of design and implementation that differentiate our CSCL approach from its closely related CSCW basis.