21. Progettare il Role Taking a sostegno del Collaborative Knowledge Building

Abstract

Role Taking is a learning strategy through which one or more members of a group cover a specific function, defined explicitly within the educational context and entailing well defined duties and responsibilities. It has been proved to be effective in both offline and ondine contexts. This paper aims to illustrate how to improve online RT in order to support the collaborative nature of knowledge building process. Collaborative Knowledge Building is, indeed, a complex process that can be supported and facilitated by a distribution of tasks, each assigned to a specific role, which is then taken, in turn, by the students. In our paper we describe the planning and application of some roles (e-tutor, summarizer, map builder ecc.) in a university blended learning course. All roles have been designed according to the principles of Knowledge Building. Our analysis have shown how RT supports a constructive and collaborative participation to the learning activities.