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This paper explores how wiki may be used to support secondary education students' collaborative creativity processes and how such interaction can promote critical and creativity thinking. A science case-based project in which 81 secondary students participated was designed, implemented and evaluated. Students worked in the science wiki project during two weeks. We scaffold students to be collaboratively engaged in purposeful critical and creative discourse in order to solve collectively science challenges and construct meaning about topics related to environmental challenges. Through the analyses of students' contributions in the wiki we have characterized collaborative creativity processes in science inquiry that includes performance (processes to develop a novel way of approaching and understanding the problem) and collaboration (peer collaboration, dialogue). The significance of the paper relays on the operationalization of the collaborative creativity processes in the wiki within four overarching learning to learn together skills, which are: distributed leadership, mutual engagement, peer evaluation and group reflection. Our findings showed that the wiki environment afforded the development of an effective and creative online collaborative learning community. In student's wiki contributions, the four learning to learn together skills took place. However, not all the groups displayed the four learning together skills during their collaboration in the wiki and there were differences among groups in relation to the presence and proportion of these skills. We discuss the contribution of these four learning to learn together skills for the collaborative creativity processes and the relation of the presence of the above mentioned skills with the level of creativity showed in the collaborative writing product students produced in the wiki project. Besides, the paper discusses a series of issues that instructors should consider when wikis are incorporated into teaching and learning for creativity. We claim that embedded scaffolds to help students to argue and reason creatively in their contributions in the wiki environment are needed. [For the complete proceedings, see ED557311.]

One key feature of scientific community is collaborative shared enquiry and problem solving mediated by electronic networks. We report on the development and evaluation of an ICT tool to support learning how to learn together (L2L2) in Science Education as part of an EC funded project called 'Metafora' (FP7-ICT-2009.4.2/257872). Through literature review we isolated some key features of L2L2 and inquiry science processes. We turned these into icons within an ICT environment to support planning and reflection of inquiries stimulated by real-world challenges. In this paper we report the design-based research study carried out in secondary schools in Spain in order to gain understanding about the Metafora's technological and pedagogical affordances to support students' awareness of the key aspects of learning together and the key scientific inquiry processes. Our findings suggest that the ICT environment may help rise students' awareness of key collaborative scientific processes. These findings may contribute to the development of tools to support more web-mediated collaborative learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to examine the development of higher students' metacognitive knowledge after they participated actively in a specific Computer Supported Collaborative Learning system called KnowCat. Eighteen university students participated in a 12-month learning project. During this period KnowCat learning environment was used to support scaffolding process among equals during problem-solving tasks. After the instructional period using the mentioned system, the students were interviewed and their work in the shared workspace was traced. Qualitative analysis revealed that the instructional application of the KnowCat system can favour and improve the development of students' metacognitive learning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goals of this research are addressed to design, implement and evaluate and instructional approach that helps students to learn from web information. We developed on-line learning materials which focus on specific curricular contents and provide specific scaffolds which help students to accomplish web-based tasks. These scaffolds pretend to give support students' information-seeking activities as they asked question of interest, searched for information, organised and assessed their findings, and created rich representations of their newly constructed understandings. We designed a yearlong study to investigate the depth and accuracy of secondary students' content understanding as well as their development of searching and managerial strategies as they utilized on-line resources to solve instructional tasks. Our research found experimental group students performed statistically better the computer-based activity than control group students. To us, the good results obtained in our study on students' web performance show the positive incidence of the instructional approach on development of more efficient searching and managerial web-information strategies and its contribution to enhance digital literacy in Secondary Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]