Pedagogic coherence in virtual didactic authoring communities

Although good content correctness can be observed on the web, one may have difficulty finding a set of entries covering a complete syllabus of a course with a coherent pedagogic approach. We conducted an experiment to test the hypothesis if a collection of didactic contents can be discussed, distributed and produced by an online community of teachers sharing the same subject of interest. The ¿negotiation of meaning¿, a concept present in the Communities of Practice Model, inspired the design of this experiment, which evolves in a virtual environment, rendering possible the exchange of ideas on didactic material judged necessary for class use. We present the main lines of the method as well as the results obtained from 39 grade school teachers divided in seven groups. The results showed that the adoption of activities in the method aroused in the participants a high level of satisfaction in relation to the didactic content they had produced; despite their lack of experience dealing with virtual environments.