EXPERIENCE ON NETWORK COLLABORATIVE WORK IN THE ESAR PROJECT OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

The ESAR project (C/018373/08), financed by the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for Development (AECID), establishes a cooperation between teachers teams from the Zaragoza University (Spain) and the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste (Argentina), with the aim of sharing, implementing and evaluating research about on-line collaborative work in the initial science teacher training. Our aim is also to establish networks for permanent interchange between both universities and to evaluate the results from this collaboration.
The communication between both groups takes place personally by means of seminars and practical classes with the future teachers from both universities, and also not personally by means of a telematic environment that facilitate the interaction and the collaboration for the diagnosis, the problem solving and the educational decision-making.
Our aim, as far as the students are concerned, is to develop abilities for cooperative work in the internet, by means of different activities and the elaboration of educational materials related to the study of combustion. In relation to this topic, both groups analyze the advantages of the ICT and the network environment in order to improve the learning process, and make proposals for the teaching process.

The University of Zaragoza team has a good experience in the development of innovation projects making use of the ICT applied to education and the cooperative network learning. On the other side, the Universidad del Nordeste team has made didactics research in the teacher-training and projects of educational innovation. In this project our aim is to gain experience in cooperative learning based on the ICT, to evaluate the results and to develop new applications, adapted to both university contexts.