Distinguishing knowledge-sharing, knowledge-construction, and knowledge-creation discourses

van Aalst, Jan

General indexes of participation in Knowledge Forum-Notes Created, Percentage of Notes Read, and Percentage of Notes Linked-were obtained using the Analytic Toolkit (ATK) for Knowledge Forum; these kinds of measures have been used in many studies of online discourse (Guzdial and Turns 2000; Hsi and Hoadley 1997; Lee et al. 2006 ; van Aalst and Chan 2007; Zhang et al. 2007) . While high values of all three measures are not necessarily indicative of knowledge construction or knowledge creation, the measures can be informative. For example, a low percentage of notes read would suggest a low level of awareness of ideas in the database. Conversely, a high percentage of linked notes could indicate attempts to synthesize and integrate contributions. These measures are correlated with both performance on self-assessment tasks and knowledge advancement, although such effects are contingent on the discourse being explanation-driven (Niu and van Aalst in press).