Fostering highly engaged knowledge building communities in socioemotional and sociocognitive hybrid learning spaces

With the aim of understanding sociocognitive and socioemotional hybridity in learning spaces, we examined a semester-long learning community where students were given the freedom to advance their epistemological and social agendas across face-to-face and online settings. We collected and analyzed 1,780 online notes written by students throughout the semester and coded them based on their sociocognitive or socioemotional values. We then examined the conversation chains that students engaged in vis-a-vis their developments as a group. In addition to showing how the group developmental stages served as a macro-level context for the socioemotional and sociocognitive spaces, the analysis highlighted how deep, rapid, community knowledge building conversations spontaneously emerged in relation to the timing of socioemotional developments. This study elucidates an important dimension of hybrid spaces, emphasizing the need to design activities to support both sociocognitive and socioemotional spaces in technology-enhanced learning communities.