Collaborative knowledge building more

Group work is commonplace in post-16 education and yet its process and outputs is being changed radically by the use of technology. Even in face-to-face and blended courses, students use combinations of institutional and personal technologies extensively to manage the group work process. Web 2.0 collaborative tools, including wikis, blogs and social bookmarking, make collaborative knowledge- and artefact-building more accessible than ever before. They may also disrupt the learning process, provoke tensions between individual and group understandings and challenge traditional notions of academic outputs. We draw on the words of learners who have developed effective strategies for using technologies for peer learning to show how these technologies are changing the ways learners create knowledge artefacts and what they value about the process. This chapter discusses user-created content, ‘patchwork’ writing, sharing and re-use, and the role of assessment in collaborative knowledge building.