Learning and Power Relations on Collaborative Knowledge Building Cyber- Discourse

Abstract

This paper is mainly composed of two sections. Section (I) provides a review of Carl Bereiter’s and Marlene Scardamalia’s theories of knowledge, learning and mind in education. Firstly, to examine how they apply Karl Popper’s 3–world schema for collaborative knowledge building discourse with a brief evaluation of their ontological, pedagogical, scientific and technological justifications. Secondly, to mention the educational significance of inter-world interactions for cyber-based teaching and learning context for evolutionary growth of human knowledge. In Section (II), one power-cohesive domain in a collaborative knowledge building research community is brought out, apart from the affective and (meta)-cognitive ones, reflected from Bereiter’s and Marlene’s research works. In particular, by using M. Foucault’s concept of ‘panopticism’, an in-depth discourse analysis is carried out to explore how power-relationships among some IT educational staff members in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong affect their perception of potential impacts of cyber-forum upon the overall research community. Lastly, a conceptual review of ‘cyber-based collaborative learning’ is offered and further research agendas are implied for enhancing collaborative learning and researching communities in Hong Kong.