In order to develop a vision, this paper offers a distinction between a technological situation for collaboration and a collaborative technology. I build this distinction on the results of research on situated learning and the educational philosophy of John Dewey. Understanding the potential power of truly collaborative technology requires re-examining individualistic assumptions about experiencing, knowing, and learning. In this pursuit, pragmatic philosophers and situated learning researchers have been unknowing allies. Knowledge is seen as practical capability for doing and making.
Meaning is seen as a construction of a social unit that shares a stake in a common situation.
Although he has been generally ignored and misunderstood, appreciators see Dewey anticipating Wittgenstein, and trace direct connections in the work of Quine, Rorty, and Davidson. Dewey criticized the conception of experience as personal, cognitive, and directed primarily from the world to the passive mind. He viewed experience as biological and social, as emerging through transactions between people and the physical and social world with which they engage. In contrast, the dominant cognitive view is that experiences are objectively definable, but are primarily personal and not sharable. Dewey's notion of inquiry flowed from his conception of a problematic experience.