Integrating synchronous and asynchronous support for group cognition in online collaborative learning

The Virtual Math Teams (VMT) environment has recently integrated a wiki component into its text chat and shared whiteboard system. The wiki component serves a number of purposes, such as summarizing synchronous small-group interactions and sharing the results among groups in an asynchronous knowledge-building community. The VMT project is part of an effort to investigate group cognition--the accomplishment of problem-solving and knowledge-building tasks by small groups, particularly in online, distributed contexts. This paper is an experience report on the use of the VMT system with middle-school, high-school and junior college math students, with masters-level information science students and with research teams. It synthesizes findings from the analysis in many published case studies of VMT system usage and describes recent extensions to the system, integrating a social-networking portal, a knowledge-building wiki, a group-cognition chat room and a shared whiteboard with history, awareness and referencing tools