Virtual learning communities (VLCs) rethinking: Collaboration between learning communities
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Virtual learning communities (VLCs) rethinking: Collaboration between learning communities Stefanos Nikiforos 1
& Spyros
Tzanavaris 2 & Katia-Lida Kermanidis 1
Received: 9 July 2019 / Accepted: 6 February 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Research in the field of collaboration in Virtual Learning Communities (VLCs) has mainly focused in learning and social interactions. At the same time, research related to cyberbullying mainly refers to social media contexts. In the current research, bullying behavior was examined through the collaboration process between learning communities. Two (K-12) learning communities, one VLC and one Physical Learning Community (PLC) that extended its hypostasis to the web, collaborated through the Wikispaces web-based collaborative platform in order to implement a cultural project. Taking into account the main aspects of the sociocultural learning theories, the collaboration process between the two (2) communities has been analyzed: the dialogues exchanged and the artifacts created were analyzed, focusing on i) the detection of the aggressive behavior (bullying), ii) the teacher’s role and iii) the inner speech. The key question was whether the communities had been emerged into a homogenized community. Results indicated that the attempted collaboration raised new questions about the interactions between the communities. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time such a linguistic and behavioral analysis for the collaboration process between communities is applied to VLCs. Another innovative challenge is the language targeted in the analysis, namely Greek. Keywords Virtual learning community-VLC . Discourse analysis . Bullying .
Collaboration . Inner speech
* Stefanos Nikiforos [email protected] Spyros Tzanavaris [email protected] Katia-Lida Kermanidis [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Education and Information Technologies
1 Introduction 1.1 Communities People establish and form communities, according to their mutual interests, beliefs, principles and ideas. Membership, support and communication are fundamental benefits for the members of the communities. They develop a common communication code, a linguistic idiom, which is essential for communication in a community. It is the tool for facilitating the interaction among them, building rules and creating moral code (McMillan and Chavis 1986). Learning communities are a popular type of communities created throughout the world. Members of learning communities, communicate and collaborate to serve their educational needs. Learning communities are not groups that just learn through collaboration processes. Building a community is time-consuming. Members with common beliefs, values and trust interact and create their common history (Hiltz 1985; McMillan and Chavis 1986; Preece and Maloney-Krichmar 2003; Rheingold 1993; Rovai 2002a). Social interactions and communication between the students strengthen their sense of community
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