3. SOME PEDAGOGICAL NOTIONS FOR LEARNING WEB LITERACY

3.3.1 Collaborative knowledge building communities

Collaborative knowledge building (Scardamalia and Bereiter 1994, 1999) is an approach to provide learners with authentic in-the-world experience of what their future in the knowledge society will entail. According to this approach, the aim of the knowledge building community is to produce new knowledge through sharing and collaborating. Members of the community bring into the community their own expertise and knowledge and share it by participating in the knowledge building discourse. The contributions are for the benefit of the community, yet, as individuals participate in this kind of dynamic and collaborative process, both collective and individual learning takes place.

Also Lave and Wenger (1991) in their approach to learning stress the importance of situated learning. According to them, learners' cognitions are connected to the situation, the context in which they are used in an inseparable way. Closely connected to the Vygotskian (1978) approach, also Lave and Wenger see the learners as not learning de-contextual knowledge but rather learning to adapt to the social practices of a community, in other words, learning how to act intelligently within that social environment. This kind of social environment can be facilitated by striving for authenticity of both knowledge building and the authenticity of learning goals, activities and materials (see eg. van Lier 1996).

Both Lave and Wenger (1991) as well as Scardamalia and Bereiter (1994, 1999) place an emphasis on collaboration. By collaboration they mean the members participating in the knowledge building discourse. Bereiter (2002:351-353) describes this discourse as a group thinking process. In other words, according to Bereiter (2002:58), thinking itself is a social process and knowledge resides distributed, outside the mind. This may seem contradictory to what we have already stated about individual minds and, for example, the development of metacognitive knowledge in chapter 3.2.2. We again refer to Vygotsky's (1978) idea that social practices precede individual learning. The individual learning, however, is always social and collaborative in nature. Even if you work "alone" with a book, a video, a web page, or another Available Design (see ch 2.2.1) it has always been constructed by someone, at some point of time in some social and historical context, and you can be seen to engage in a collaborative social practice.

Collaboration is also widely accepted form of learning within the language learning research. For instance, Nunan (1992) places an emphasis on learners as a significant resource for language learning. Also Kohonen (1992:14-39) discusses, to mention a few, the importance of joint responsibility, social support and the shared personal contributions as benefiting the group learning processes.

As to the learners, they are regarded as members of the community. We can also refer to them as participants who are actively involved in knowledge building. Lave and Wenger (1991) use the term legitimate peripheral participation, which contains the idea of the new-comer participants having an important, legitimate role in the community. Learners are regarded as participating in the community of practice and moving from peripheral participation to full participation in these cultural practices. The concept of participation contains both the intrapersonal and interpersonal activities and is used when referring to "situated negotiation and renegotiations of meaning" (1991:51).

In our case, Netro learning space is created to support the learning community in its collaborative knowledge building on the concept of web literacy. Situated learning refers to learning web literacy on-line, on the web, collaboration is facilitated by technology and the learners are regarded as important members of this knowledge building community. We will elaborate more on these aspects in relation to Netro later in chapter 3.4. but first we need to understand more about the role of technology in meaning making.