Education Sciences is announcing a Special Issue entitled “Learning Together: Collaborative Learning Practices in the Digital Era”. This Special Issue will focus on addressing the ways collaborative learning practices impact inclusive digital learning, as well as the innovative use of digital technology. The digital era has changed the society we live in, and the accelerating pace of technological developments has meant that current emerging innovations, such as X-reality technologies, AI applications, Internet of Things, and blockchain, might soon become outdated. Thus, a challenging task is to explore the potential in implementing new technologies for efficient and meaningful collaborative learning practices and for identifying new ecosystems to utilise collaborative learning processes across disciplines and practices. It seems obvious that digital resources have changed the nature of how we live, work, study, and interact with each other, on the one hand making the services we need more accessible and our lives easier. These changes in our society facilitate critical and dystopic discussions, as well as naïve vistas and new radical improvements in technological capacities. In this Special Issue, we aim to address and discuss new emerging collaborative learning practices that entail aspects of learning together, and to acknowledge the importance of considering digital technologies, its ethics, as well as social and cultural consequences. In this way, the issue is a contribution to a broader social understanding of collaborative learning practices in an era of digitalisation.
We aim to reflect contemporary research trends in the design of collaborative learning practices in the digital era by emphasising the issue of working towards democratic and inclusive digital solutions of collaborative learning environments. Possible topics may include learners’ understanding of collaborative learning practices; implementation studies on digital collaborative learning practices; innovations through working together; digital tools to create learning environments that encourage collaborative creativity; challenges of implementing collaborative digital learning environments; conditions for learning together in digital practices; and digital infrastructures and tools for collaborative learning practices. Submissions on any other topics within the scope of this Special Issue are also welcomed and will be fully considered. The areas of application can include different disciplines and practices where the overall topic of learning together in collaborative practices is involved.
