Synchronous Tutoring of a Virtual Community

The role of tutors has changed over time, depending on models of learning and on the technology available. This paper discusses the evolution of the tutor role and presents a new model concerning the tutoring of a virtual community. The definition of a virtual community starts from a theory of communities of learning and takes the features of the virtual environment into account. A project in which an educational virtual environment was designed and built by seven classrooms participating at a distance will be described in detail. The chats on-line are analyzed combining two analysis systems: a) a category system describing the tutor’s on-line functions; b) a discourse analysis exploring the dialogical and interactive dimensions of the tutor interventions. Results gathered from this study highlight typical features of tutoring on-line a virtual community. On-line tutorship is a fluid, situated and dynamic process of meaning negotiation. Tutors take over each others’ specific roles and students act as tutors to each other.