Collaborative Learning in Software Development Teams

Recently Web 2.0 has emerged as a framework to study collaborative learning. Assessing learning in team projects is onemechanism used to improve teaching methodologies and tool support. Web 2.0 technologies enable automated assessmentcapabilities, leading to both rapid and incremental feedback. Such feedback can catch problems in time for pedagogicadjustment, to better guide students toward reaching learning objectives. Our courseware, SEREBRO, couples a social,tagging enabled, idea network with a range of modular toolkits, such as wikis, feeds and project management tools into aWeb 2.0 environment for collaborating teams. In this paper, we first refine a set of published learning indicators intocommunication patterns that are facilitated in SEREBRO. We apply these indicators to student software development teamdiscussions regarding their collaborative activities. We show how the refined patterns, captured by SEREBRO\u27s Web 2.0modules, are catalysts to the learning process involved in software development