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19 - Knowledge Building and Knowledge Creation

from Part IV - Learning Together

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

By
Marlene Scardamalia  and
Carl Bereiter
Edited by
R. Keith Sawyer
R. Keith Sawyer
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Summary

This chapter describes a pedagogy whereby students learn how to engage in collaborative creative processes similar to professional knowledge workers. The five themes of knowledge building are (1) Community knowledge: students work together to advance the knowledge of the entire community; (2) Idea improvement: all ideas can be continually revised in an ongoing creative process; (3) Dialogue: community knowledge building involves public discourse along the lines of professional discourse in a scientific community; (4) Constructive use of authoritative information: students always need to work with authoritative information, even while they are creating new knowledge. New knowledge creation must be coherent with what is already known; (5) Epistemic artifacts: knowledge building is more effective if learners create externally sharable things. The chapter describes the authors’ influential Knowledge Forum application, one of the first networked collaborative idea-generation tools.

Keywords

knowledge buildingtheory buildingepistemic artifactsKnowledge Forumcollaborationdiscoursecommunity knowledge
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences , pp. 385 - 405
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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