Creando comunidades virtuales de aprendizaje: análisis del progreso de las interacciones

Authors

Ramón Tirado MoruetaSalto de línea Juan Manuel Méndez GarridoSalto de línea Universidad de Huelva. Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación. Departamento de Educación. Huelva, España.

Abstract

Creating virtual communities of learning: analysis of progress from interactionsSalto de línea Salto de línea In every community of learning, the interaction between the community’s components and learning are the fundamental pillars which provide the community with sense and meaning. There are many empirical studies and reviews devoted to studying the interaction in cooperative-learning groups. Less work, however, has included the time factor to describe the progress of interaction in the development of learning communities. This study focuses on the Drog@ Project, a part of the Interreg III-A initiative (Spain- Portugal) that consists of on-line courses to train university students to motivate one another to prevent drug abuse at university. These students analyzed different search engines and found information in several message boards and other Internet forums. Their goal was to describe the progress of interaction in the process of learningcommunity development and creation. Whereas this analytical technique alone was used, no conclusive explanatory findings could be gathered, given the fact that personal factors (and other factors) were not subjected to control. Yet, this work does furnish a methodological approach to the study of how learning communities evolve, and thus enables a more thorough comprehension of the characteristics, process and telling sociocommunicative factors of the evolution of learning communities. Nevertheless, because of the ethnographic orientation of this research, discrepant models of evolution could be drawn from these student groups, giving indications of the real value of interaction, the sense of cooperation and belonging to a group and the feeling of a certain social presence in the creation of a virtual community of learning.

Keywords

Didactic interaction, virtual communities of learning, cooperative learning, on-line learning, university education.