Abstract:

The intense interaction of children and young people with technologies reflects in the way they think and learn, making therefore the teachers task to help them use these resources critically, since their spontaneous tendency is to receive passively both information and contents.
When today we refer to the Web in particular and its importance in the teaching –learning process, we no longer think of read-only contents, but in the supporting infrastructure which allows them to create and share contents and a space for collaboration and discussion, ideas associated to the concept Web.2.0.

The blog, as a means to deploy the concept ‘on-line interaction’ is, according to Granieri, “the most accessible and natural tool for sharing and publishing: in addition to text, images movies and also sound will be increasingly disseminated, because of increasing speed of data transmission" (2006, p. 31). It is therefore natural that the use of the blog is more and more frequent as a resource, pedagogical strategy or in other capacities at all levels of teaching (Gomes, 2005).

The Integrated Model of Thinking, proposed by Jonassen (1996), presents a model of ComplexTthinking which integrates Basic, Critical and Creative Thinking. This model, explicitly or not, underlies the educational blogs intended for children and young people in basic education, which I am currently following in the context teaching and supervision initial and post graduate training of teachers.

In this paper, a case study is presented based on some of these blogs, focusing on: the methodology for collection of text and multimedia materials; treatment and analysis of data with the NVIVO software; the findings.

The conclusions to derive are: a) the users’ spontaneous interventions show characteristics of basic thinking; b) evidence of critical thinking can be found in two contexts- as reaction to a direct challenge, proposed as a comment by a visitor or as an answer to the tasks oriented to this type of thinking proposed by the moderator; c) creative thinking is rare and appears almost always as a reply to the moderator’s incentive or that of an attentive specialised user; d) the role of the blog moderator is paramount in the development of complex thinking in the context of blog on-line interaction.