Abstract:

Our purpose was to gain an in-depth fine grain look at the 72 teacher students of three universities, one of Australia, Chile and England, experience of working in an international virtual group using a ‘wiki’. Students worked in 17 groups of four or six, with two students from each university.
They resolved the question: what is an effective learning environment for students in our contemporary world? given five dot points in their answer agreed by all group members.
The project lasted three weeks. There were student assistants in English language to Chilean students. The research questions were: What was the students’ experience of working and learning in an international virtual space? What approaches to learning did the students adopt? How technology works when students learn about learning? How they engage and work within the construction knowledge task?
Data collection included wiki transcript, the reflective journals and a final survey.
This study aimed to explore how students engaged on building knowledge through a collaborative activity online. Our intention was to promote interest in building deep and complex understanding of learning environments for the XXI Century, but students reached only the first stage of social construction of knowledge proposed by Gunawardena et al. (1998). The main constraint was that they showed too much agreement on the ideas presented by each participant. This prevented them from achieving higher levels such as the exploration of dissonance or co-constructing of new meanings.
Only five of 17 groups solved the task collaborating each other. Eleven groups show partial achievement of interaction, with contributions, or dialogues between a few members
It is probably that the task constraints have affected the performance of groups. The lasting of only three weeks and the demand to add a commitment to participate in this activity, may have stimulated a minimum participation in this experience.
One of the additional data from this study could provide some light on the observed participation rate. In response to a survey applied at the end of this experience, slightly more than half of the students stated that the task helped them to have a conversation about learning, but many of them believed it would be better to use resources that allow them synchronous communication, as chat or messenger. Apparently, there is a need to feel each other's presence across the line at the present time. The trend of students for appreciate the quick and brief answers, may have become frustrating the experience for a half of the participants. Probably, new experiences could make arrangements to take advantage of these student preferences and prove if improves the disposition and the performance of participants in online collaboration task.

Keywords:

On-line international collaboration, learning using technology, teacher education, knowledge construction.