Community knowledge, collective responsibility: The emergence of rotating leadership in three knowledge building communities

Developing cultural capacity for innovation is an educational imperative. The challenge in schools is to foster a culture of sustained, creative work with ideas, as in out-ofschool Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) and cyberteams that self-organize to create knowledge. In this study, we examined the online knowledge work of three Knowledge Building classes, where young students assumed collective responsibility for creating and improving their community knowledge. We adopted the COIN concept of rotating leadership to visualize collective responsibility for knowledge advancement. Using a mixed methods approach, we conducted social and temporal network analyses, then content analyses of student notes to further assess cases of student leadership. Overall, we found relatively decentralized student networks, with most students leading the group at different points in time; when leading, students were connecting unique ideas to the larger class discussion. We discuss our findings within the context of designing embedded, transformative assessment for knowledge building communities.