Interoperability in asynchronous collaborative learning forums

"Asynchronous collaborative learning forums" (abbreviated as: ACLF) is the generic title given to a category of educational technologies that are widely used, variously understood, but that manifest specifiable uniformities in their structural and behavioral characteristics. This paper enumerates these uniformities in a manner such that they can be represented as a general, abstract model independent from, but also descriptive of specific implementations and systems. This paper then outlines such a model, and shows how it would allow collaborative learning activities to be analyzed, evaluated, and managed in ways that are both flexible and platform-independent.