[Jermann et al.2001] Jermann, P., Soller, A., and Mühlenbrock, M. (2001). From mirroring to guiding: a review of the state of the art technology for supporting collaborative learning. In Proceedings of EuroCSCL, pages 324–331, Maastricht.
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This paper reviews a bunch of systems for the management of collaborative interaction and propose a classification framework built on a simple model of coaching. The authors sketch four phases of the coaching collaborative interaction (supporting or managing the members’ metacognitive activities related to the interaction). These four phases gradually move from “mirroring” to “guiding” the collaborative activity. The former term refer to the system’s ability to gather data about the group members’ interaction and use this information to visualise the activity for the users. Is then up to the users to interpret and decide what to do. The latter term refer to an approach by which the system assessment is hidden to the users. The system use this information to make decisions about how to moderate the group. This second approach has to deal with a model of ideal interaction, which is not trivial to design.

We can imagine a third state which is not constraint by imposing a predefined model nor that has to deal with the in-definition of user’s expectation and understanding of the representation.