Incorporating Digital Tools For Informal Peer Group Learning

Peer group learning is being introduced in many educational systems as an effective way of developing social and cognitive aspects. We observed that there is a spontaneous informal peer group activity among university students which takes place mostly at outdoor locations. Since it is difficult to acquire conventional mediation tools and artifacts at an outdoor location, conducting group learning activities in such resource constrained environments is tedious. Nowadays, most students carry wireless connectivity enabled laptop computers which can successfully be used as a mediation artifact. Our objectives in this research is to develop an appropriate framework to help and motivate students to conduct peer group learning activities using their laptop computers. In this paper we provide a comparative study of existing potential collaborative and cooperative peer group learning tools, describe their features and emphasize the need for a specifically developed tool for informal peer group learning that can incorporate these features.