Knowledge building

From a sociocultural perspective, learning is a process carried out in interaction with more knowledgeable others. Those 'others' can be adults, they can be teachers, or they can be peers that know more about the topic than we do. In peer to peer interaction, what normally happens is that we discuss what we think we know about a topic, then we try to iron out the differences between what we believe. These differences are called 'dissonance' and they cause a 'cognitive conflict' because what you believe is not the same as what I believe. The truth is that our beliefs are caused by our experience; since we don't have the same experience, we probably don't hold the same beliefs.
Anyway, sharing these differences and negotiating them to try to come up with the truth is what we call knowledge building. Notice then, that we usually don't learn because someone tells us something: we learn because we- together with someone else- build our knowledge.
This is what I feel didn't happen with the participants in my study: they limited themselves to finding definitions and posting these on a wiki without ever discussing if what they were doing matched what they believed about how vocabulary is learned.
So, that's the next step in the project.