Around 2008, the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) at the University of Cambridge began to experiment with a different approach to online research collaboration and learning environments, both functionally and technologically. From a functional perspective, they established a few basic principles:
Everything is social: These days, it seems hard to imagine designing software for the Web without incorporating some social element. Furthermore, education and research are inherently collaborative endeavors that should lend themselves naturally to the social web. But they aren't a perfect fit for today's consumer web social tools. Colleges and universities have ethical and legal obligations to protect privacy; simply suggesting the use of Facebook is, as a consequence, a less than ideal solution. But more fundamentally, academic collaboration is different than generic social networking. It revolves around content and subject...