Virtual learning communities (VLCs) rethinking: Collaboration between learning communities

Research in the field of collaboration in Virtual Learning Communities (VLCs) has mainly focused in learning and social interactions. At the same time, research related to cyberbullying mainly refers to social media contexts. In the current research, bullying behavior was examined through the collaboration process between learning communities. Two (K-12) learning communities, one VLC and one Physical Learning Community (PLC) that extended its hypostasis to the web, collaborated through the Wikispaces web-based collaborative platform in order to implement a cultural project. Taking into account the main aspects of the sociocultural learning theories, the collaboration process between the two (2) communities has been analyzed: the dialogues exchanged and the artifacts created were analyzed, focusing on i) the detection of the aggressive behavior (bullying), ii) the teacher's role and iii) the inner speech. The key question was whether the communities had been emerged into a homogenized community. Results indicated that the attempted collaboration raised new questions about the interactions between the communities. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a linguistic and behavioral analysis for the collaboration process between communities is applied to VLCs. Another innovative challenge is the language targeted in the analysis, namely Greek.