Close to INDIE's focus (namely computer-aided science investigation) are systems like CoVIS [Edelson, Pea, and Gomez 1995] or CSILE [Scardamalia and Bereiter 1991]. In these systems, students can post claims on an electronic bulletin board. The claims can then be supported or disconfirmed with facts that the same student or other students also post. Students can also submit commentary and new conjectures about the same theory or new ones. The claim-support-commentary structure is formalized to help students structure their arguments in a coherent way--posts can only have one purpose (such as to put forth a theory or comment on data), and teachers intervene to make sure there is some level of accuracy. As theories are proved by weight of evidence provided, a jury of students, mentors, and teachers can ``publish'' these completed arguments that are then taken as facts that support or disconfirm new arguments.
The collaboration-based learning systems depend on students bringing disparate information to the collaboration; it is assumed that the amount of information on a subject vastly exceeds any one student's ability to find and marshal it. In an INDIE system, every point in the application is already accessible to every other student, and new information can't be added to arguments since they couldn't be critiqued. Sharing evidence lists from student to student would be frustrating and counterproductive; students would still have to hunt through the experiments and expert evidence to find the points they saw in their classmate's notebook, yet gain none of the context or interest of discovering them.
Covis and CSILE require human critiquing because of the unknown evidence students will bring. This allows for very intelligent critiquing (assuming the humans are intelligent), and novel responses to novel situations. It also requires a great deal of time and effort on the part of the teachers and eliminates the private nature of students' interactions with computers. If a student makes an obvious mistake in a collaboratory system, it might be humiliating at worst and at best merely wasteful of the rest of his or her classmates' time. In INDIE, the electronic critiquer will patiently spend time with the student clearing up obvious misconceptions.