Collaborative and cooperative knowledge co-construction in the TeNeGEN project - Summary

The declared aim of TeNeGEN project was “to draw the teachers’ and the schools’ attention to the pedagogical possibilities hidden in the connectivism and network learning” by replying to the radically changed communication and learning habits of net generation.
The impressive, creative, further education course for teachers in Hungarian language realized within the scope of TeNeGEN programme clearly achieved the aim set. To say the least it seems to be unambiguous for an external analyst.
According to communication and learning process moving on ‘turbulently’ on the educational portal of the project, the course not only drew the attention to the pedagogical possibilities hidden in the connectivism and network learning. The course has created a real, exciting and useful knowledge co-construction community from the participants. It seems to be very useful for the majority of them.
We analysed the communication and learning processes of Hungarian participants in details but of course not exhaustively. We studied certain quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the process of knowledge co-construction essentially with social network analysis methods.
The selection of the concrete methods and aims of our analysis couldn’t be without the knowledge of relevant special literature. Therefore we gave pedagogical and network analysis references and explanations in the study.
The TeNeGEN community stood in the centre of the inquiry. The community consists of groups, but the barriers between these groups were blurred so the whole community can be counted a unified one. The current process of knowledge co-construction inside the community was examined mainly by means of interactions between participants on Moodle-based educational portal.
We created a dichotomized, quadratic matrix from their special connections, and it made the use of SNA methods possible. The densimetry and descriptive statistics gave important information about the common structure of networks and according to the indicators of centricity an opportunity presented itself to the separation and exact characterization of central and peripheral nodes. Unfortunately, the use of CONCOR method wasn’t expedient to specify the structural equivalence that renders the structure of groups.
According to the results we can unanimously pronounce that the learning process was collaborative, and multi-participatory inside the group. The learning process hasn’t become single-pole, although the role of project leader was enormous in the collaborative learning processes.
Mainly the ‘Agora’ forum has been transformed into the exciting and substantial centre of collaborative learning. The project leader oriented the students in the direction of the adequate discusses and called the participants’ attention to avoid the off topic comments and parallelism. However these efforts inevitably, partly because of technical reasons, weren’t successful entirely.
The collaborative learning was pursued in a unified space. The parallelism of personal blogs and learning logs should have been decreased.

The majority of participants evaluated the project as active, memorable, useful in the long run learning process. It harmonizes our impression.

Zsolt Tóth: Collaborative and cooperative knowledge co-construction in the TeNeGEN project
West_Hungarian University

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