The purpose of this chapter is to present a method based on blended activities and able to build a blended community. The blended activity design approach is based on a set of theoretical principles such as socio-constructivism, Activity Theory and Cultural Psychology and, keeping up with these principles, it offers a set of activities that are able to enrich the potentialities e-learning can offer to higher education and blended approach can suggest to community life. This chapter depicts a method to design and implement constructivist blended courses for higher education where, at any time, online and offline can be mixed. The complex architecture described allows a mixture of different educational and psychosocial models, an alternation of individual learning activities, various types of collaborative learning, group activities, and community participation. A sense of belonging to the blended community is unavoidably fostered through: (a) group and plenary discussions, (b) reflections on the roles students covered during the course, and (c) the construction of collective artifacts.

Blended learning communities are defined by specific learning and psychosocial processes based on the multilayered sense of belonging of the group’s members, related to the merging of both virtual and real interactive contexts. This chapter focuses on the psychosocial dynamics of blended communities, in order to identify some specific participation strategies and identity dynamics, which both vary with the double interactive context. We used a qualitative variant of Social Network Analysis to analyse the interactions of two blended student communities, identifying various participation trajectories and identity positionings of the group members. The results revealed that the blending of two communication contexts generates different psychosocial dynamics from those activated by the same community in a wholly on- or offline context. The combination of interactive environments results in participation strategies in which members can choose distinctive trajectories, shaping their original identity positionings.

Starting from a socio-cultural perspective of learning as a social process of participation in ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger, 1998), we studied participation trajectories in three blended learning communities, characterised by the combination of various communication settings. By mixing social network analysis and qualitative content analysis, we studied – in a ‘diagnosis phase’ – two such blended learning communities, in order to reorganise –in a second ‘action phase’ – the general architecture of the blended course, and to evaluate – in a third ‘maintenance phase’ – the impact of this reorganisation in a third blended learning community. The three phases were aimed at improving participation dynamics in blended learning courses according to an action-research paradigm (French and Bell, 1973). Results show that a careful design can promote active participation in blended communities through the merging of different communication settings, varied membership levels, diverse group sizes and definite social cohesion practices.

The aim of this article is to propose a methodology for studying the dialogical nature of identity both in virtual and real contexts. The proposed methodology tries to implement the concept of positioning that combines Dialogical Self theory (Hermans, 2001a; Hermans & Gieser, 2012; Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010) with other sources (Goffman, 1979; Harrè, Moghaddam, Cairnie, Rothbart & Sabat, 2009; Tan & Moghaddam, 1999; Vion, 1995). A brief review of the literature on current methods to analyze identity dynamics sets the background for our methodological proposal that introduces an innovative and qualitative use of Social Network Analysis, generally employed to examine relational interactions of a community. The qualitative use of SNA produces an original methodological device called Positioning Network Analysis (PNA), where network nodes represent identity positionings. We will explain conceptual steps of PNA by providing some examples for each step. Our aim is to show the versatility of this tool both in virtual and in real contexts of blended communities.