Abstract:

The Collective Learning digital tool, developed by the University Institute of Biocomputing Research and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) of the University of Zaragoza in collaboration with Kampal Data Solutions, is designed to generate collaborative solutions to the tasks or problems it presents. Its design is based on a collective intelligence model that generates different phases of interaction between the participants, which also creates a learning environment. However, the anonymity of the participants and the social network format mean that not all participants orient their actions within it, so it is important to gain a better understanding of the processes that underlie these practices, which are not so much task-oriented as popularity-seeking.

Therefore, in this paper we analyse this type of responses, the troll responses, that appeared in a working session within the Collective Learning platform. A total of 245 primary school students participated in the session, simultaneously connected online in a single group. The participants from 10 different schools are between 9 and 12 years old, all in the 5th and 6th year of primary school. In this session, they analysed a situation in which a joke was created between friends and spread through a Whatsapp group without the consent of the participants.

After collecting all the participants' responses in the seven work phases generated within the platform, all the responses that could fall into the category of trolling were selected and their characteristics and spread within the session were analysed. The results show that, in these age groups, these responses are not very frequent, they tend to have a low diffusion rate, they tend to be much shorter than the rest of the texts and, when they are long, they tend not to have an elaborated syntactic structure.

Keywords:

Collective learning, collective intelligence, primary school students, trolls.