Exploring collaborative aspects of knowledge building through collaborative summary notes

We explore the use of collaborative summary notes in Knowledge Forum (TM) (KF) as a way to capture the distributed nature of knowledge advances among groups of students building knowledge together. The purpose of this exploration is to develop assessments that can be used for scaffolding the discourse and promoting ideas within the community, as well as for evaluation. The unit of analysis was the group on KF. Students in two high school classes collaborated on a progressive inquiry exploring aspects of a recent SARS outbreak and some related topics. They were asked to write collaborative, co-authored, summary notes to make the nature and importance of the knowledge advances they achieved clear for their peers. The findings indicate that note ratings were positively related to the number of co-authors and the number of views (different discussion spaces) in which students had worked.