Elementary Students’ View of Collaborative Knowledge Building in LearningVillages

Abstract

LearningVillages (LV) is an online game-based virtual learning environment. It aims at facilitating elementary students to pursue social inquiry learning and hence attain collaborative knowledge building (CKB). LV operates in the form of massively multi-player online role-play gaming. Different villages in this “virtual world” represent different societal issues. To embark on the development of a village, students have to inquire collaboratively into the issue therein. Besides delineating the pedagogical design of LV, this paper also discusses our quantitative study on investigating the CKB affordance of this educational innovation from the student perspective (involving 229 elementary students in Hong Kong). Results showed that LV brought desirable CKB experience to the students in general. On top of that, we found the students with low academic achievement held a more positive perception (i.e. the affordance of LV in facilitating CKB) than the students with high and moderate achievement did.