This chapter aims to evaluate the potential of existing techniques that, before being adopted, should be selected and eventually integrated or modified to suit the different educational situations. For this purpose, we will provide a summary of good practices concerning structural innovation in education, as experienced in Italian schools: school-community relations, the promotion of relations with families, the stimulation of meta-cognitive learning, school twinning, interdisciplinary learning, and management of assessment and remedial activities. Even if apparently these latter topics may pertain mostly to cognitive processes, these ideas share a socio-constructivist approach, which underlines the strict relationship between learning and collaborative activity, hence focusing on relationships between the knower and the known, as stated by Vygotsky (1978) and Jerome Bruner (1987). This states that knowledge is generated through social interaction, and through this interaction individuals gradually progress through their levels of knowing. Social constructivism is currently the most accepted epistemological position associated with computerbased learning (Kanuka and Anderson, 1998), given the crucial role of relationships in virtual communities, and in this chapter many examples of how this theoretical framework can be implemented in school activities will be given. New ICTs, both in their online and offline dimensions, represent a

potential tool for an extraordinary qualification of the educational experience, framing the most recent development of our knowledge society; Koschmann (1996), discussing new technologies and education, argues:

Traditional theories of learning treat learning as a concealed and inferred process, something that takes place inside the learner and only inside the learner. CSCL [Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning] research has the advantage of studying learning in settings in which learning is observably and accountably embedded in collaborative activity.