Learning in virtual communities: perspectives in the feld of sociological and pedagogical research

Abstract

This article aims at implementing its theory and methodology to the debate on virtual communities used as learning communities.
We shall therefore submit a research hypothesis that is yet to be verifed empirically, in order to share the theoretical construction and the methodological set-up that form its foundations. The pedagogical vision is fltered through the lenses of sociology where the individual and the academic and technological community can face a fnal wider project: the construction and generation of knowledge through the use of open and transitional communities, in which each of the individual identities has the possibility of recognizing itself at the same time as a single and as a collective project.
This will be addressed to a new social exchange where it will take place in an open context, a transitional one, of exchange and of webs in which the word community takes on a broader and less limiting meaning.
No community is in fact “naturally” drawn to high levels of formative objectives like refective thought, relational capacities, individual and social empowerment, but can nonetheless be manipulated pedagogically, working on the construction of relations and on their multiplication.
Virtual space becomes a resource if it favours aperture and transits and if it allows the construction of a social capital, usable as an individual resource.