Contemporary collaborative trends and their effect in education

Collaborative learning has become an increasingly popular method of engaging students in the learning process. The activities included in this type of learning focus on the interaction that occurs between users when they are working in groups and they often incorporate solutions to real life problems. Collaborative software development to support this process has grown in popularity over the last years. In this paper, we evaluate software tools that are used in Collaborative Learning and investigate how these software tools can affect the learning process and to what extent they have influenced the educational process. In this study we focus on contemporary collaborative trends, their unique characteristics, and their assimilation and implementation to education and we propose learning activities that exploit their advantages. The results, among others, depict the significant extent of new technological achievements' effect on the educational process.