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

van Aalst, Jan

The remainder of this paper reports a case study of asynchronous online discourse in Knowledge Forum using a coding scheme based on the distinctions between the three discourse modes. The data are drawn from a design experiment (Brown 1992; Collins et al. 2004) in which the researcher and teacher collaborated to achieve two goals: to achieve a fuller implementation of the knowledge-creation model than in previous iterations, and to test a new assessment strategy (van Aalst et al. 2005) . The assessment task was designed to extend our previous work on portfolio notes, in which students had used concepts describing collective aspects of knowledge creation individually (Lee et al. 2006 ; van Aalst and Chan 2007) . The new task was intended to underscore that knowledge advancements are collective achievements in a knowledge-creation community; it asked students to collaborate to review whether knowledge advances had been made on the problems they investigated and, if so, to coauthor a Collaborative Summary Note with all who had contributed to the collective advance. While the work students did together throughout the project involved both the division of labor (cooperation) and joint activity to understand the same problems and ideas (collaboration), the word "collaborative" in the name of the task signified that students were to work together to review and create these notes (for details see van Aalst et al. 2005) .