Digital ecologies introduce great capacity for social networking and collaboration between people of different specializations resulting in a more effective learning experience, in a more condensed period of time. For this collaborative work to be accomplished and result in effective learning, there are many Collaboration Tools. As Collaboration Tools are defined integrated online community platforms with social technologies for building collaborative and shared knowledge bases. There are many classifications of Collaboration Tools regarding diffrent aspects; from the type of collaboration perspective there are Communication Collaboration Tools, Coordination Collaboration Tools, and Collaboration Tools. As far as the dimensions are concerned there are Synchronous and Asynchronous Collaboration Tools. The following video introduces a suite of Collaboration Tools popular among software product development teams, produced by a company called Atlassian. 

What makes Collaboration Tools like Atlassian's Bitbucket interesting, from a pedagogical perspective, are the underlying affordances (ubiquitous learning, active knowledge, collaborative intelligence). One of the affordances is that of collaborative intelligence. Bitbucket summarizes the capacity for collaboration between different teams that can interact anywhere, anytime, and for giving continous feedback in order to better the product they work on, resulting in what we call Collaborative intelligence [1]. The following hypothetical example clarifies the said affordances of this Colaboration Tool. 

For Google to release the app Google Maps and make this product useful to the pubic, many teams had to work together: software engineers, market team, support team, information technology team and so on. Each individual of these teams and each team itself hold a unique knowledge and expertise. But the 21 first century's demands necessitate the continuous collaboration between these teams in order for the outcome to be good. Bitbucket enables, for instance, marketing workers to learn how to "read" software programs, in order to detect the flaws and give usefull feedback to software engineers. Or the support team can give the software team feedback regarding bugs and weaknesses of the program. This is collaborative intelligence in first hand. 

From a pedagogical point of view, Collaboration Tools encompass many aspects critical to the learning experience and finally success of the team or the teams in collaboration. One aspect highlited as important in the process of learning is that of intrinsic motivation [1] . The sense of reciprocity that is formed in these collaborative environments triggers a motivation different from that in the traditional learning environments. The learners, and in our paradigm the working teams and the individual workers in each team, are motivated firstly by the task itself (namely the are motivated around the aesthetics of the production), and secondly by the sociability of the environment. In simple words the learners/ workers in this collaboration environment consider themselves as knowledge makers and valuable knowledge producers whose contribution support other teams and can make them successfull aspiring to the accomplishment of a mutual objective. 

The motivational structures created in collaboratie environments result in what we call Help Economy. The workers' contribution is considered valuable because they give feedback and support to others members of their team, and/or other teams, and the workers' learning product is attributed to others' feedback and support as well. 

Another aspect is the outcome to the learning process. As Dr. M. Kalantzis said in the lectures, reasearch suggest that when individuals with different orientation come together to share their knowledge, and different perspectives and experiences come together, the people in collaboration can extend the level of detail and thoroughness to a subject area.  Collaboration Intelligence leads to more in depth knowledge on any subject area. 

Collaboration Intelligence also suggests a change in the assessment in the educational environment, as far as the object of assessment and the process of assessment is concerned [1]. The object of assessment is now the cognitive actions of the learner to make a knowledge aritfact, and the knowledge artifact itself. As for the process of assessment, in degital environments and reflexive pedagogy it is continuous, reflexive and recursive, called as Recursive Feedback. 

In conclussion, one could say that collaboration environments facilitated by collaboration tools, support teaching of a Growth Mindset (Carol Dweck). Enhancing learners or employees with Collaboration Tools result in teaching them a growth mindset, in teaching them to believe that their abilities can grow with endeavor and continuous interaction and collaboration with other individuals of common or not expertises and interests. 

References

[1] Cope, B., and Kalantzis, M. (2016). Conceptualizing e-learning. In B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (Eds), e-learning ecologies. New York: Routledge (forthcoming)