Special issue “Web-2.0 technologies in support of open, team-based learning and innovation”
Computers in Human Behavior

Aim
Team-based learning has become an increasingly more important form of learning, benefitting organizations and individuals alike. As organizations rely on networked communication ever more and as teams also form in a more ad-hoc fashion outside the confines of traditional organizations, the impact online networks have on team-based learning increases accordingly. However, although rapid progress is being made on the technical aspects of the social web, the question of how these technological innovations should be deployed to make social and pedagogical sense remains underdeveloped. This goes in particular for the virtual teams of professionals that emerge outside of the confines of the traditional organization. These kinds of teams form within or between social networking sites, are to some extent supported by them, but arguably thrive in spite of them. Yet it is these distributed, networked teams of individual professionals that hold the largest promises for unconventional forms of knowledge sharing and transformative, open forms of innovation and creativeness. ‘How can these kinds of team best be supported?’, ‘What kinds of existing or emerging technologies can best facilitate them?’, are the kinds of questions we seek to address in this call for papers.

Topics
We are looking for both conceptual and empirical work. Specifically, we are soliciting papers that seek to conceptually develop or empirically research the following questions:
- What technological means best support the processes of team formation, rearrangement, and disbandment? Standing organizations have a variety of means to form teams, to rearrange them and to disband them. For networked teams, such mechanisms are less obvious, if they do exist at all. Yet, without technologies that for instance support the formation of coalitions or trust, networked teams are disadvantaged.
- What technological affordances support the storage, processing and retrieval of knowledge exchanged and generated by networked teams? Team-based learning is only feasible if the team’s collective knowledge can be stored, processed and retrieved as needed. Such teams fare better if the affordances for sharing, processing and retrieval are smarter, better suited to the teams goals.
- What technological affordances foster knowledge sharing and co-creative, productive interactions in networked teams? Teams learn through sharing knowledge between its members and through the joint creation of new knowledge. This requires frequent and smooth interactions between team members. It requires that team members reflect on their achievements, but also on the goals set and the methods used to arrive at them. It requires that team members learn by actually carrying out tasks, by switching as need between the roles of apprentice and master. And it requires that teams are facilitated to cross the boundaries of their team easily, involving other individuals, contacting other teams and organizations in case of need.

Important Dates
- Submission Deadline: April 1, 2011 (extension of submission deadline to May 7th 2011)
- Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2011
- Final camera ready versions due: September 1, 2011

Submission Procedure
Papers should be submitted via email to both guest editors: Peter Sloep (peter.sloep_at_ou.nl and Simos Retalis (retal_at_unipi.gr) Authors should consult the (a href="http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authors.authors/howtosubmitpaper")Elsevier's Guide to Publication(/a)

Guest editors
Prof. dr. Peter B. Sloep, Programme Director Research & Development Technology Enhanced Learning at the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies of the Open University of the Netherlands.
Dr. Symeon Retalis, Associate professor at the University of Piraeus

This special issue is organised as part of the idSpace project on Tooling and Training for collaborative product innovation [http://idspace-project.org]. It is funded in part by the European Commission FP7-IST-2007-1-41, project number 216799.