Collaborative knowledge building through simultaneous private and public workspaces

Abstract

Socioconstructivism postulates that learning is both a personal and a social process. The specific needs of diverse student audiences’ forces educators and pedagogical engineers to redesign digital environments to foster collaborative and personal learning. As collaborative platforms evolve, rethinking their activity settings (task, artefact, scenario) becomes critical. The aim of this research is to assess whether the use of simultaneous private and public digital workspaces promotes collaborative knowledge building through the analysis of students’ performance and interactions in a collaborative concept map. The focus is on an experimentation carried out with 5 groups of tenth-grade history classes in two different high schools in France. The results show a tendency of the techno-pedagogical device to foster the collaborative knowledge building.