RICERCA ITALIANA     

DIGITAL IDENTITIES AND VIRTUAL, EDUCATIONAL, PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITIES

Università degli Studi di Bari

Abstract

This research project arises from the collaboration of 8 university sites and one research center, located in different parts of the national territory. All the participants have in common a strong scientific interest on technology and social interaction in formal and informal contexts.
Many of the participants to this project have a long lasting tradition of collaboration and reciprocal exchange testified by publications, symposiums within national and international conferences, and various events jointly organized. Furthermore many participated to the start up (in the 2005) and development of a research association called Collaborative Knowledge Building Group (CKBG) (www.ckbg.org) that represents an important place for collaboratively building scientific knowledge at a national level, although the center is also known and appreciated at an international level.
The theoretical background shared by this research group comes from socio-constructivism approaches. In such approach technology is considered as an artifact, an expression of the cultural community within which the artifact appears and at the same time, as able to change and re-shape the cultural and the individuals that produced the artifact. In this project technology will be studied by looking at several aspects of human life: from the contexts analysis to the analysis of individual processes and the relationships individual establish within the groups they belong to.
Therefore, the overall >>>

Principal Investigator

Maria Beatrice Ligorio Università degli Studi di BARI

Research Objectives

A first general objective the project aims to achieve concerns the relationship between digital technology and socio-psychological processes involved in its usage. The technologies inquired in this project are those conceptualized as spaces of social interaction, thus able to function as a container for daily activities. We consider mainly web-forums and blogs but also other types of complex platforms provided by tools for collaborative writing, for building cognitive maps, for data sharing and for the construction and management of digital portfolios. When we refer to socio-psychological processes we mean:
• individual psychological processes: among these processes the identity construction process will be studied as a social process, interdependent and distributed among individuals, environments and artifacts. It will be studied as I-positioning are played in virtual spaces where it is possible to give and receive feedbacks of different kind and, therefore, I-positioning will be reciprocally influenced. It will be also inquired the exposition to interactive mediated computer environments on the construction of professional identity, gender-identity and strategies of self-narrative used by teens using blogs. Metacognitive processes will be also studied in order to understand the efficacy of technology in formal learning contexts, especially in terms of competences of self-regulation developed by using technology in a collaborative way. Motivation will be studied >>>

First Results

This research is aimed at advancing the understanding of psychological and social processes implied into the participation to virtual communities; consequently it will be defined educational models able to take in account the relevance for learning to such processes.

Expected results will go in two directions:
1) theoretical- methodological: it is expected to understand the role played when performing on-line activity by some psychological and social dimensions such as personal and professional identity, motivation, sense of belonging, gender differences, etc.. Moreover, it will be also studied how technology recursively would impact self-perception as teacher, student, and teen as well as the development of self-regulation skills. Finally, it is also expected to clarify the explicative socio-constructivist hypothesis that sees technology and socio-psychological factors as mutually related and distributed in a complex system composed by individual-environment-artifact. Some psychological dimensions, such as the sense of belonging to a community and the strategies of interaction and communication, so far have been studied using the some methods used to study face to face interactions. Therefore specificity of on-line environments has been neglected and could not be used to empower on-line educational environments. A proof of this is that environments such as blogs and web-forums are having an increasing popularity when used for entertainment or informal >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

This research is part of a wider socio-constructivist framework that supplies an interpretative description of the human activities and psychical life, including an active role of technology (Vygotskji, 1978; Wartofsky, 1979; Engeström, 1987, 2001). Technology is considered as an instrument that, at an individual level, mediates the relationship between psychical processes and environment, and that, at a historical level, is handed down through generations together with the meanings of the activities in which it has been constructed and; finally, at a sociocultural level it modifies the culture in which has been produced (Cole, 2004).
Some digital technologies are useful to receive and to reconstruct culturally meaningful activity systems (Ligorio, 2002; Spadaro, 2007). They are telematic instruments commonly used in order to daily communicate, such as web-forum and blog, but also more complex platforms in which it is possible to initiate collaborative activities finalized to produce new artefacts or to learn. In such technologies, the impact on the cognitive, identity and social systems seems to emerge more strongly than the socio-constructivism had assumed. One of the more important telematic affordances consists in being able to be filled up with contents not coming from just an individual, but from many people interaction. This peculiarity makes internet a powerful social mediator that does not need to wait the times of generational change in order to modify the >>>