In the contemporary era of ubiquitous lifelong learning, educational research increasingly operates in everyday settings outside classrooms and lecture halls. The present poster introduces the challenges and opportunities in approaching collaborative learning in the decision consultation of family forest owners. The context of learning is semi-formal communication between a forest owner and a professional forest consultant. The empirical case is Finnish forest planning, which is challenged by criteria of sustainable development (Mebratu 1998), and structural changes of family forest owners (Karppinen & Hänninen 2006). According to Hujala et al. (2007), planning service could approach owner-orientated and communicative decision support. The present study utilises the concept of collaborative learning, in which the learning is examined as social activity (see Littleton & Häkkinen 1999). The general research questions of the study are: 1) How committed participants are to perform a common task and how equal is the participation (Barron 2000)? 2) Which elements show that the owner and the consultant act collaboratively? 3) How could this collaborative process be enhanced? The aim is to enhance the abstract objective of authentic collaboration to become more concrete and more applicable in practice.

The study follows the principles of design-based research the main aim being to develop and test a design, through which questions arisen from the real-life practice would be answered, but also the theoretical issues and knowledge would be advanced (see Collins et al. 2004) .The design in the present case is the work instruction of forest planning of Finnish regional forestry centres. The instruction specifies recommendations of interaction for the consultant who offers decision support service. The realisation of the instruction and the elements of collaboration are evaluated in the occasions of personal meetings between the consultant and the owner. The first dataset comprises video-recordings of 5 occasions based on the existing work instruction. Both the forest consultant and forest owners were interviewed before and right after the meetings. The observations and reflections were discussed in a recorded evaluating session involving the researcher team, the forest consultant and a representative from the planning organisation. Some argued changes and refinements to the design were made. During the data collection, similar kind of development rounds will be iterated three times. The data will be analysed with content analysis by using NVivo programme for interviews and Transana programme for video recordings.

The first evaluating session yielded the following central conclusions: The tacit knowledge already existing in the personal practices of the consultant deserves to be made visible, and the means to enhance owner-orientated communication and collaborative knowledge construction need developing. The second round interfered more unambiguously to the possibilities of the landowner to make true choices related to plan. The whole study process is expected to result in concrete, conceptually sound, and transferable recommendations for decision consultation to better enable collaborative learning.