TROLLING IN VIRTUAL LEARNING SPACES: A PROPOSAL FOR ANALYSIS FROM COLLECTIVE LEARNING

The emergence and evolution of the internet has brought about many changes in society, including in the educational paradigm.With the rise of Learning and Communication Technologies (LCT), the way students learn has changed.One example of this is online collaboration tools, such as the Collective Learning platform, which allows hundreds of students to group together anonymously and synchronously to solve activities on any subject.The aim of the platform is to reach consensus, make decisions and establish learning processes around different topics.However, despite the fact that students interact and communicate indirectly on the platform during the tasks, its purpose is far from that of the social networks in use.Despite this, it has been detected that on Collective Learning, as on other digital leisure platforms on the Internet, trolling behaviour can appear, i.e. behaviour initiated by anonymous users on digital platforms to annoy other users and hinder online communication.In Collective Learning, this behaviour is seen through trolling responses that some students make while doing activities on the platform.These types of responses hinder the development of tasks in Collective Learning and jeopardise the learning processes during them, and should therefore be analysed.In this study, we report on an experiment in which 265 students aged 12-16 collaborated online to solve a case about extreme popularity seeking on social networks.The aim is to detect the troll responses elaborated by the students during the task and to establish common characteristics among them.Our work shows how troll answers can appear in a task on socioemotional development on the Internet with students of Compulsory Secondary Education.These types of responses may reach a certain popularity within the platform, but their general tendency is to disappear as the activity progresses.Finally, with the study presented, it has been possible to establish a set of common characteristics among the troll responses on the platform that has allowed the development of a definition for them and thus open a more favourable path for their detection and mitigation in future activities carried out with Collective Learning.