What is Polyphony

This chapter presents a model for hybrid and collaborative learning based on an analogy with musical polyphony, starting from Bakhtin’s ideas of dialogism. The model considers different voices (participants) inter-animating and jointly constructing a coherent tune (a solution, in problem solving), enabling other voices to adopt differential positions and to identify dissonances (unsound approaches). This chapter introduces also software tools, which visualize the discussion threads in a chat and the influences that an utterance has on the subsequent ones. Such tools help both teachers and learners to evaluate and enhance the learning process. The model helps to understand how learners inter-animate when they participate to collaborative chats for problem solving or other learning activities, including Hybrid Learning.