Costruire conoscenza nei web-forum: due studi di caso = Construir conocimiento en los foros de discusión online: dos estudios de caso

We live in a knowledge society that requires continuous knowledge advancement as essential for social progress. Consequentially the primary task of education should be sustaining students in this knowledge-creating process. But how it would be possible to assess this process in an online discussion? And how we can evaluate learning process including both the individual and the social dimension (Chan, van Aalst, 2004)? In order to give to teachers some important and practical tools to assess and improve students participation (Mazzoni, 2005), we analyzed how students develop and carry on online discussions to understand how students learn skills and knowledge with and through technology. Therefore, the aim of this research is to analyze how students develop and carry on the knowledge building process in different online discussions. In particular, we would analyze how students develop concepts – theories – on the course contents and which interactive strategies they use to support the discussion within the group. The discussions were held for two university courses: the first one is an Italian course (University of Bari) on Educational Psychology and e-Learning course, the second one is a Spanish course (University of Granada) on Information and communication Technology applied to Education; both the courses have been projected and put into practice in a blended-learning mode, in fact students had face to face meetings and online activities, as discussions on the web-forum. First of all, we describe in detail the courses and the platforms used for online activities, to understand better the context in which knowledge building develops; then we present the analysis methods and the reached results. Due to the goals of the research and the kind of recording data we choose to use a mixed analysis. The qualitative one aims to deeply understand the content of the notes in the forum, both as concerns their evolution from “simple theories” to “complex theories” and the interactive strategies used by students. While the quantitative one let us know the relationship of elicitation among strategies in order to understand which strategies are more effective to support an online discussion. Results shows that the knowledge building process is not spontaneous and it must be carry out constantly; moreover both contents and interactive strategies are deeply influenced by organization of the course and by its tasks and its goals