Can teachers' discussion lists be a tool for in-service collaborative learning? what reveals a three years analysis?

Following Wenger (1998), discussion lists for inservice teachers are often considered as examples of communities of practice. Such lists have an important role in the professional communication of French teachers and exist for all secondary disciplinary fields. The increase of users for ten years indicates that this exchange medium can be an instrument for professional development. But, many discussion lists are managed by the ministry of education, and one can wonder if such lists are open spaces for all kinds of sharing or kinds of institutional disciplinary showcase. We studied all the messages, during three consecutive years, of a specific discussion list for management secondary teacher (named IGC – 2752 messages) and an extract of a private list for librarian teachers (named CDIDOC – 935 messages) and adopted an ad hoc coding process (with a triple dimension) to get an in-depth view of the nature of exchanges and an understanding of list regulation. The goal of the research is to get evidence of a list as a collaboration tool but results obtained give a contrasted picture of such teacher discussion list, more normative than democratic.