e-Highlight: a tool 2.0 for collaborative learning in a Social Media Platform

This paper describes a tool, called e-Highlight, which allows learners to highlight the most significant parts of a Learning Object of textual type, and to annotate and remember them in the time, thus as happens in the studying process with a paper support. The tool allows us to associate to the parts of the text selected one or more keywords in order to facilitate the classification and to make a more immediate retrieving later on. The integration of the tool in the learning environment 2.0, YouLe@rn, designed by our team, allows us to share the text highlighted with other learners generating, thus, a tag cloud and encouraging forms of knowledge negotiation for the construction of collaboratively networked learning, according to the socio-constructivist model. In this way, to the consolidated formal mode of learning are added those spontaneous and informal typical ones of digital natives. In this paper are also presented the results of an investigation, which allowed detecting the potential, the criticality and the degree of satisfaction of its use in a university context.