The Role of Social Interactions and Cognition in Digital Spaces

Whether explicitly used as a research aim or implicitly discussed as an outcome, the concept of community is central for collective pedagogies as it allows researchers to study how people perceive the networked environment as a learning space. Taking the contextual factors into account, this research questions the characteristics of a community that are related to learning. I explore how different types of relationships among members of a learning community are indeed related to learning. I conceptualise the concept of community using social capital theory and argue that it can inform the ways by which the perceived level of learning is understood with respect to interaction patterns. The findings suggest that both distributed-diverse communications and strong-close communications are manifest in learning. However, the impact of diverse relationships on learning is considerably larger and stronger compared to denser relationships.