Prior research has highlighted the educational benefit of enabling students to participate in collaborative learning activities. Developing technology that extends the physical boundaries of the classroom and enables students to engage in meaningful collaborative learning activities outside class time can be of significant value. For any computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) application, there are two issues to address. Did the students learn? Did the technology adequately support the students' collaboration? The latter question can be referred to as the "collaborative" part of collaborative learning. The collaborative application must create an online intersubjective space that adequately supports the students' collaborations. Building applications that meet this criterion is not a trivial task. The thesis presents the WikiDesignPlatform (WDP). The case is made that the standard wiki, in conjunction with the platform's extensive set of e.g. awareness, navigational and communicative components comprises a framework that is particularly well suited for custom building collaborative learning applications. The thesis presents evidence showing that because wikis are sufficiently plastic, they afford building applications for a variety of collaborative learning activities that share a common lingua franca of interaction. Students only have to learn one style of interaction and can more readily switch between different collaborative learning activities and applications within a single semester/course. The thesis reports on two case studies that range significantly in how much support was needed for the students' collaborations. The evidence shows that under both conditions, WDP-based learning environments provided a sufficiently rich intersubjective space that adequately supported the students' online collaborations. The evidence also shows that the WDP can support metacognitive tasks, like reflection or self/co-explanation. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]