ITCOLE means “Innovative Technology for Collaborative Learning and Knowledge Building”. The ITCOLE project has focused on developing innovative pedagogical models, design principles and technology for collaborative knowledge building to be used in European education. The ITCOLE-project was supported by the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies programme (IST) as part of the ‘School of Tomorrow’ thematic action line. The models and technology have been tested and disseminated throughout the European education landscape free of charge in order to help in building a coherent and unified network of participants that supports sharing of expertise, content, practices and tools. The project has developed a network spearheading the use of collaborative learning technology by utilizing pedagogical best practices.

ITCOLE consortium

Design and Coordination

• University of Art and Design Helsinki, Media Lab
Technical Developers

• Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT)
• University of Murcia, Department of Computer Science
User / Developer

• Helsinki City Education Department
Pedagogical Research

• University of Helsinki, Centre for Research on Networked
Learning and Knowledge Building, Department of Psychology
• University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Social and Behavioural
Sciences
• University of Salerno, Department of Educational Science
• University of Rome La Sapienza, Dep. of Psychology of Developmental
and Social Processes
• University of Athens, Department of Philosophy and History
of Science, Cognitive Science and Educational Technology Laboratory
• University of Utrecht, Department of Education
 
ITCOLE project focuses on developing innovative pedagogical models,
design principles and technology for collaborative knowledge building to be used in European education.

The first stage of the project included reviewing
the state of the art in CSCL practices and tools, generating
practical pedagogical models for the use of
CSCL tools and refining them into a set of best practices.
The second stage of the project involved implementing
the first working prototype for a next
generation CSCL system that enabled collaborative
knowledge building according to the best practices.
The prototype was tested, evaluated and improved
through several development cycles in order to arrive
at a highly usable, robust and scalable multiuser
knowledge building environment to be used on
the web. The third stage work consisted of evaluating
the software tools and pedagogical practices in
various schools around Europe in order to find the
best match between innovative local practices and
the designed software and pedagogical models. This
phase resulted in further refinement and development
of the learning environment (the software and

related practices) fusing it with the findings of the
evaluation and benchmarking phase. The final stage
work aims at disseminating the software and practices
widely and free of charge throughout European
schools. For dissemination the project has build
a self-sustaining online community of practice, eurocscl.
org, that will continue to use, develop and disseminate
the tools and practices.
The project consortium is made up of pedagogical,
technical and design partners. High level pedagogical
expertise as well as active practitioners of education
with tight connections to teachers and schools
have been brought to the project via the pedagogical
partners. The technical partners, with earlier
experience in developing computer supported collaborative
software systems, and the design partner’s
ability to conceptualize the pedagogical ideas
as a working software system have ensured the high 11
quality of the software tools developed.