Wikis provide new opportunities for learning and for collaborative knowledge building as well as for understanding these processes. This article presents a theoretical framework for describing how learning and collaborative knowledge building take place. In order to understand these processes, three aspects need to be considered: the social processes facilitated by a wiki, the cognitive processes of the users, and how both processes influence each other mutually. For this purpose, the model presented in this article borrows from the systemic approach of Luhmann as well as from Piaget's theory of equilibration and combines these approaches. The model analyzes processes which take place in the social system of a wiki as well as in the cognitive systems of the users. The model also describes learning activities as processes of externalization and internalization. Individual learning happens through internal processes of assimilation and accommodation, whereas changes in a wiki are due to activities of external assimilation and accommodation which in turn lead to collaborative knowledge building. This article provides empirical examples for these equilibration activities by analyzing Wikipedia articles. Equilibration activities are described as being caused by subjectively perceived incongruities between an individuals' knowledge and the information provided by a wiki. Incongruities of medium level cause cognitive conflicts which in turn activate the described processes of equilibration and facilitate individual learning and collaborative knowledge building.

Social media are increasingly being used for educational purposes. The first part of this article briefly reviews literature that reports on educational applications of social media tools. The second part discusses theories that may provide a basis for analyzing the processes that are relevant for individual learning and collective knowledge construction. We argue that a systems-theoretical constructivist approach is appropriate to examine the processes of educational social media use, namely, self-organization, the internalization of information, the externalization of knowledge, and the interplay of externalization and internalization providing the basis of a co-evolution of cognitive and social systems. In the third part we present research findings that illustrate and support this systems-theoretical framework. Concluding, we discuss the implications for educational design and for future research on learning and collective knowledge construction with social media.

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This study describes the empirical test of a theoretical model of knowledge building with wikis that was recently introduced by Cress and Kimmerle. The underlying assumption of this model is that both learning (as an internal, individual process) and knowledge building (as the creation of public knowledge) are based on the interplay between an individual's knowledge and the information available in the wiki. Incongruity between individual knowledge and the information contained in the wiki will lead to learning (through the acquisition of factual and conceptual knowledge) and to knowledge building (through assimilation and accommodation). In three conditions, the experiment provided the participants with different levels of incongruity between their individual knowledge and information in the wiki by varying the amount of information that was contained in the wiki, while the amount of information that the participants possessed was kept constant. As predicted, the results confirmed that a medium level of incongruity between an individual's knowledge and the information that a wiki contains will best support learning. Moreover, a medium level of incongruity leads to more accommodative knowledge building despite the fact that high and medium levels of incongruity will result in similar amounts of assimilative knowledge building. The implications of these findings were discussed in the concluding remarks.

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BackgroundHealth knowledge develops fast and includes a lot of ambiguous or tentative information. In their daily routine, both health care students and professionals continuously have to make judgments about the viability of health knowledge. People’s epistemological beliefs (EBs) and their therapeutic health concepts are factors that influence how they deal with health knowledge. However, very little is known about the occurrence of these factors at different stages of people’s career. The present study examines the EBs and therapeutic health concepts of physiotherapy students in their vocational training and the EBs and therapeutic health concepts of professionals.MethodsIn a cross-sectional study physiotherapy students and professional physiotherapists filled in a questionnaire that measured their personal EBs about physiotherapy and medicine, as well as their biomedical and biopsychosocial therapeutic health concepts. We compared the participants’ EBs regarding both knowledge domains, and their therapeutic health concepts using paired samples t-tests. We also examined the differences between first-year students, advanced students, and professionals regarding their EBs and their therapeutic health concepts using ANOVAs.ResultsEighty-three students and 84 professionals participated in this study, 114/167 (68%) participants were female. EBs as well as therapeutic health concepts differed depending upon the participants’ training status. Professionals had more sophisticated EBs than students regarding both knowledge in physiotherapy (F(2, 164) = 6.74, P = 0.002, η2p = 0.08) and knowledge in medicine (F(2, 164) = 5.93, P = 0.003, η2p = 0.07). In addition, high values in a biopsychosocial therapeutic health concept already occurred in an early phase of training (F(2, 164) = 5.39, P = 0.005, η2p = 0.06), whereas increased values in a biomedical concept did not occur until people’s professional life (F(2, 164) = 10.99, P < 0.001, η2p = 0.12).ConclusionsThe specificities of personal EBs and therapeutic health concepts in different stages of health care training have so far been insufficiently considered in medical education research. The current study has aimed to shed light on the occurrence of these concepts in students as compared to professionals. We point out implications of our findings for educational practice and make suggestions for future research.