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

van Aalst, Jan

From a cognitive perspective, Knowledge Forum is designed to support knowledge construction through the use of scaffolds, which are sentence starters such as "my theory" that keep the writer and reader focused on cognitive processes. Knowledge Forum also has a variety of features that support working with ideas after they have been posted including: (a) the ability to revise notes; (b) the ability to add a note as a reference to another note; (c) the ability to reuse a note introduced in one workspace in a later workspace created for a different purpose (a workspace in Knowledge Forum is called a view for "point of view"); and (d) the ability to create rise-above notes, which have a special icon and are used to take the discourse to a higher conceptual plane. The ability to link notes is useful for making visually evident the connections between ideas. Knowledge Forum also makes it possible to objectify ideasto share them and then allow the community to work on them. The above-mentioned features then support the work of improving such objects, reviewing progress, and synthesis.