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

van Aalst, Jan

The computer notes were entered into Atlas-ti® Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) software for coding; 399 notes were coded (approximately 60,000 words). Each view in Knowledge Forum was entered separately, beginning with the first view of Group A and ending with the last view of Group D. Most of the development of the coding scheme was done using the data from Groups A and B. The researcher started with a small set of codes based on knowledgecreation principles and prior research into asynchronous discourse, and gradually expanded the set. He started by focusing on the text, and applied each code that seemed relevant to a given text segment; the amount of text varied from a sentence to a few notes depending on the code (Hmelo-Silver 2003). The process was then repeated focusing on the codes and working through the corpus checking for potential examples for small groups of codes.