14. Il forum come strumento di costruzione di conoscenza

Abstract

Sharing the discourse – meant as collective reasoning – is one of the most important pillars of a Knowledge Building Community (KBC); the tools and the methods that allow to put this fundamental concept in practice can be both "face-to-face" and online (techniques like the Focus Group, the Circle Time, the Jigsaw, and tools like the forum, the chat, the interactive whiteboard ecc.). Within the psycho-pedagogical model of the KBC, we highlight the potentialities that can result from the use of a typical virtual learning environment – the online forum – as a tool of effective communication that supports and fosters the knowledge building process in education, but also as an inquiry tool for the researcher. We also describe, by the way of an example, the most important features of some softwares that provide different types of forum (Knowledge Forum, Synergeia, Moodle).