Knowledge and Information Flows in a Hybrid Learning Space: the students' perceptions

How much information and/or knowledge flows among the members of a collaborative learning group and between them and the external information/knowledge sources? Which stages of the collaborative process have the highest knowledge and information flows, respectively? These are the questions which the experiment described in this paper seeks to answer. The experiment involved 66 students from the University of Turin. After attending a couple of lessons on online communities of professionals and doing some basic reading, they were asked to develop, in small sub-groups, an artefact (using a wiki) to summarise what had been learnt. The students were also asked to make a quantitative and qualitative estimate of the information and knowledge flows which took place in the three different phases of studying, structuring and collaboratively developing the artefact. The stages with the highest knowledge flow index were found to be the study and structuring stages, while information flows were mainly in the actual writing of the artefact.