Monitoring shared sites: a proposal for using scaffolding

Abstract

The use of shared sites as a work tool, and for building and sharing knowledge in a “learning community” and/or “communities of practice” is undeniably a characteristic of the so-called knowledge society. The phenomenon concerns all individuals and contexts, and involves all professional categories starting from those operating specifically in the information and communication sectors. Teachers and all those working in the field of education can be legitimately considered part of these two categories. In this complexity of forms, the reality of social networking can be seen as extremely multi-dimensional. What emerges in particular is the problem of co-ordinationing contributions within the groups or communities. The solutions are by no means simple and give rise to a sort of antinomy between “guided” sites (groups or communities which identify specific roles of co-ordination, evaluation and decision-making) and spontaneous sites (groups /communities in which all the participants engage with total equality of roles). The first are based on a top-down model and run the risk of going beyond the what might be called the “social constructionist” limits that characterise the new generation web culture, whilst the latter, in their turn, risk ending up in chaos, with useless additional areas in which contributions pile up one after the other without shared progress and unitary conclusions. The question highlighted in this article rises from this antinomic context and asks how co-ordination and monitoring can be carried out in shared sites while respecting a bottom up approach and still be able to produce sharing and evolution of knowledge. A proposal is put forward which suggests that monitoring should consist of an approach based on scaffolding.