Students' orchestration of groupwork and the role of technology

This dissertation explores student self-organised hybrid collaborative practices in a problem-oriented and project-based learning environment. It reports a multi-sited ethnographic study of student orchestration of collaboration and the role of technology in collaboration. At Aalborg University, Denmark, students work under a problem-oriented and project-based pedagogical model; the students collaborate in small groups on an authentic problem of their choice, often for a semester. The model implies a high degree of student autonomy; the students manage how they collaborate on the project, including meeting place, meeting frequency, planning, division of labour, work constellations, choice of technology, and how they use technology to support their project collaboration.
I have taken an exploratory and adaptive approach to the study, focusing on describing the students' collaborative practice in addition to normative and deterministic considerations about technology, education, or students' ability to use technology for learning, with the primary purpose of developing new concepts and models helping to explain student practices.