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knowledge-acquisition have to be actively induced by a learning-community and will be vivid even more if real
and dynamic connections to the cultural, economic, political and private environment are maintained. From
this perspective common notions as of the transferability of knowledge, of learning as a simulation of
situations, and the traditional roles of the student as a receiver, and the teacher as a mediator of established
knowledge tend to become obsolete. Rather, knowledge is acquired in the communication and interplay of selfresponsible
actors.
The communicative structure supported by an educational network-environment has to be open to promote
types of interaction that may generate the necessary collaborative dynamics; the underlying system has to
establish this openness and provide transparency, configurability on several levels and adaptability to different
tasks. Several dimensions of openness can be indicated to determine the structure of the domain of interaction:
communicative openness implies the maxim, that all participants be equally and fully embedded in the
information-flow (in practice restricted by privacy protection, or the economy of distribution); operative
openness allows the participants to configure the interfaces and devise the structure of communication and
cooperation in a project; strategical openness is secured in that project-oriented methods and strategies may be
discussed, dynamically established, or modified in meta-discourse.
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This form of collaborative learning can be typified as an open discourse. In this context a discourse is thought
of as an iterative and (self)referential structure of interactions in a problem-field: it is an iterative process
where new thoughts build upon previous ones, whereby a reference structure develops; and a discourse is selfreferential
in that the methods and strategies to be applied, its organization and scope are also made its subject
(meta-discourse). A discourse is open in that its organization is promoted by individual, as well as groupspecific
approaches. It is open as it may be placed into an authentic problem-domain and also in that it is
interdisciplinary and couples different types of users.
Conceptual Model
The logistics of a GUI follows and mirrors the system-designers' conceptual model [Gorny, 95] of a given task
and it significantly models the way the user conceives and manages this task. A discourse, or more generally a
collaboration in a network-environment can be seen as the structured interaction of participants and as the
process of establishing and elaborating a context. This concept deals with interacting users and messages sent
between them and leads towards a model of collaboration on the basis of the physical connectivity. In this
super-observer-view (classical information theory) a message sent from userA (source) can be observed to be
received by userB (sink).
Seen from the participant-perspective a userA has to receive a reply from userB to "observe" (infer) userB
receiving the message. Controlling the relation between some action and the feedback userA derives the
concepts of and constructs what s/he interacts with: in this model a participant interacts with the context in
first place.
Context emerges as the inter-text of relations of singular operations [Rezabek, 93] and can be described as a
network of relations of semantically charged components and of processes of production (i.e. generation,
transformation and destruction) of these. Interactions are compensatory changes in that they are bound to a
previous state and balance the state changes. Through their interactions and transformations these contextual
components continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes and thereby constitute the basis for
the self-organization of the system.
Interaction Model
DisNet is an environment for structured communication and collaborative working, learning and playing. It
conforms with the basic idea of hyper-systems (e.g. [Hyper-G], [Hammwöhner, 93], [Keep, 93] , [Kuhlen,91],
[Willenborg, 94]) in that it allows for representing context as a linked, nonlinear knowledge structure
integrating multiple data types. Additionally DisNet integrates the common capabilities of hyper-systems (i.e.
presentation, browsing, retrieval) with features supporting the generation and dynamic differentiation of
contextual relations.
DisNet stands for "Discursive Networking" and is based on the idea of representing the process of a
collaboration as the development of a network of objects embodying discursive interactions: interactions