Abstract

This paper shows a research study carried out to support and structure virtual interaction among university students that may trigger collaborative knowledge construction in the Web, supported by a CSCL system called KnowCat. Three characteristics of the KnowCat system stand out for our educational purpose: firstly, students can share and consult their documents, enabling them to find out how their classmates have accomplished a specific task; secondly, students can express their opinion about any document in the system. These opinions have been used in our study as explicit assistance, or a scaffold, which one student gives to another in order to improve his/her work. Thirdly, the KnowCat system supports to the students’ community in the coordination of their perspectives about specific knowledge through a mechanism called Knowledge Crystallisation, which organise the community knowledge as the result of participants’ interactions.