A Framework for the Development of Educational-Collaborative Applications Based on Social Constructivism

In this paper we present a new telematic-educational framework for the development of educational applications for co-operative work. It has three layers: the first one is called the co-operative layer and it describes a work group environment; the second one is called the constructivist layer and it deals with telematic support for the constructivist and co-operative principles of learning; and the third one is called the situation layer and includes a series of metaphor-based individual and co-operative activities for the teaching-learning process. We also present a description of three telematic educational applications based on the framework. These applications are currently being used in real class environment and are allowing us to validate both the design and the usefulness of the framework