eLearning and solidarity: the power of forums

Abstract

This chapter explores solidarity as a social dimension in the context of e-learning and the Semantic Web. Its aim is to explore where the students show more solidarity with each other—in online learning environments or in offline settings? In the context of this chapter, the term “solidarity between students” means the sharing of useful resources between group members. Online forums are the major Web service that we shall use to support solidarity online. In online forums, we can ask complex semantic questions knowing that someone will understand the meaning of the question and hopefully will give us a good answer to it. Add to forums the possibility of annotation with metadata and we can also depend on them to retrieve meaning rich historical information. The research is based on case studies with focus groups conducted with Portuguese higher education health students.