Contributions of E-Collaborative Knowledge Construction to Professional Learning and Expertise

Developing Professional Competence And Expertise: State Of Research

When discussing issues of professional learning, the core reference is professional competence. In the following sections a theoretical concept of professional competence and its development is discussed, in order to develop a precise understanding of the purposes that are followed by work-related e-collaborative knowledge construction. This section presents a typology of professional competence as well as a consideration of the acquisition of competence from the perspective of knowledge construction. Several types of knowledge (e.g., declarative, conceptual, procedural, and negative knowledge) are distinguished in order to explain the capability to perform on a high level. Case examples of computer-mediated learning processes, which illustrate this general theory of professional competence in the area of e-collaborative knowledge construction, will be addressed in the third section.