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science education classes. Some classrooms participated in the Knowledge Building
International Project (KBIP), which also included classrooms from Barcelona, Hong
Kong, Mexico, and Norway in 2007-2008. KBIP teachers were learning to inform
their pedagogy using the knowledge-building principles when engaging students in
written discourse on Knowledge Forum.
Here the discourse of the 8 teachers and 115 students from Quebec who had their
classrooms collaborate using Knowledge Forum and desktop videoconferences dur-
ing KBIP 2007-2008. Basic indicators that these classrooms engaged in discourse
were the following ones: 19 views (see illustrations, Figs. 24.1 and 24.2) were devel-
oped by students and 1,547 notes were written in the 66 inquiry sequences analyzed.
Between 65 and 73.5% of all sequences had three turns or more, and 28% of all
sequences qualified as idea improvement sequences because they were found to
contain notes that (1) improve the preceding note(s), (2) challenge the preceding
note(s), and (3) move forward the questioning/explaining process (Hamel, 2007;
Laferrière et al., 2008).
Fig.
24.1
Exemplars of some of
the views developed by emerging knowledge-building
communities
