Revisiting Social Construction of Knowledge in Asynchronous Computer Mediated Communications (CMC): What to Change

Abstract

This study focuses onsocial construction of knowledge in asynchronous online forum discussions. Socialconstruction of knowledge and how to analyze the quality of interaction duringcomputer mediated communications (CMC) were studied for decades. InteractionAnalysis Model (IAM) is one of the mostly used models for determining thequality of CMC. The author also used IAM while analyzing the content of CMC activitiesin the past. In this study, the same analysis of CMC was conducted again withdifferent participants and discussion topics in order to see what changes inthe current study if the voluntary/mandatory participation to discussions, priorinterpersonal familiarity, moderating behavior during the CMC, and discussiontechnique change, comparing to previous study of the author. The aim of thispaper is to identify the levels of social construction of knowledge in CMC ofthe postgraduate students of a university in Turkey. The data of this casestudy is composed of CMC messages and views of the participants written on ananonymous open-ended questionnaire. Quantitative content analysis and thematicanalysis were conducted on the data set. The analysis of the messages by IAM ofthis case study gave slightly better results than the previous study of theauthor, and some suggestions were put forward for the future research.

Keywords

• social construction of knowledge
• computer mediated communications (cmc)
• online discussions
• interaction analysis model (iam)