The successful deployment of computer supported collaborative learning systems (CSCL) requires taking into account social factors, like preexisting and developing attitudes, relationships between users, incentive mechanisms, organizational flows of control and information. There are examples of solid user communities that formed around pieces of technology (e.g. slashdot.com), but there are also hundreds of examples of failed ones. In our experience with peer help system named I-Help [4], we discovered widely varying levels of user participation in different classes. Our conclusion from this experience was that it is important to study the sociological aspects of cooperation, to discover and describe existing relationships among people, existing organizational structures [1,7] and incentives for cooperative action [8] in the learning community.
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