Students can collaborate with students in other schools and other countries as they develop ideas, skills, and products. Students in a class can collaborate outside class without having to meet in person. The theory behind collaborative learning is that the social construction of knowledge leads to deeper processing and understanding than does learning alone (Appalachian Education Laboratory, 2005).

The bulletin board and the chat room have become the backbone of many Web-based learning environments. Sophisticated Web-based collaborative learning environments incorporate not only real-time, text-based conversation, but also audio- and videoconferencing, and shared work spaces, where multiple users can collaboratively work on the same document or application. These multimedia shared work spaces are facilitated by software such as Microsoft's Netmeeting ( http://www. microsoft.com/netmeeting/), Intel's Proshare ( http://www.intel.com/proshare / conferencing/index.htm), and CU-SeeMe ( http://cu-seeme.cornell.edu / ). Multiuser object-oriented (MOO) text-based virtual reality environments now have a Web-based equivalent, WOOs (Web object oriented),...
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