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

Abstract

This study focuses on social construction of knowledge in asynchronous online forum discussions. Social construction of knowledge and how to analyze the quality of interaction during computer mediated communications (CMC) were studied for decades. Interaction Analysis Model (IAM) is one of the mostly used models for determining the quality of CMC. The author also used IAM while analyzing the content of CMC activities in the past. In this study, the same analysis of CMC was conducted again with different participants and discussion topics in order to see what changes in the current study if the voluntary/mandatory participation to discussions, prior interpersonal familiarity, moderating behavior during the CMC, and discussion technique change, comparing to previous study of the author. The aim of this paper is to identify the levels of social construction of knowledge in CMC of the postgraduate students of a university in Turkey. The data of this case study is composed of CMC messages and views of the participants written on an anonymous open-ended questionnaire. Quantitative content analysis and thematic analysis were conducted on the data set. The analysis of the messages by IAM of this case study gave slightly better results than the previous study of the author, and some suggestions were put forward for the future research.