Previous research has frequently highlighted that an inquiry-based approach and field work are important and essential elements of teaching and learning about ecology (e.g. Ramadoss & Poyya Moli, 2011; Ergazaki & Zogza, 2008). According to Bell, Urhahne, Schanze and Pletzer (2010), field work of investigation in inquiry process consists of empirical actions to collect information or data e.g. making experiments, measurements, and organizing the data. In the analysis and interpretation phase, the data should be used for making arguments for or against the hypothesis. Bell et al. (2010) show that there is a great variety of effective computerized inquiry environments that can support students’ inquiry learning by using a variety of scaffolding methods (Fishmanet al., 2003).

This study introduces a way to support students’ collaborative inquiry process with social software in the context of biology field course. The study is part of a larger project for developing pedagogically sound ways to use ICT as part of higher education. The topic is current in Finland and internationally because teachers need skills to take advantage of different ICTs, to be able to provide their students with skills needed in knowledge society, i.e. 21st century skills (Binkley et al. 2010). This study introduces a way to use social software for supporting inquiry-based approach to learning and provides insight into students’ experiences of the method used based on data from questionnaires and recorded sessions where students evaluate the whole course in small groups.

Social software provides several tools for different purposes. A common feature for all these software is the emphasis for users’, i.e. students’, active role as producers of materials and participators in interactive activities (Alexander, 2006). The tools allow students to gather and produce materials which will be used as a source for further inquiry and learning. These materials can be in different formats: text, pictures, video etc. Social software also provides tools for editing, analyzing and publishing materials. These practices can be done collaboratively as the produced contents can be shared, commented on and edited in shared environments. Social software also allows annotating of materials with tags in order to administering and analyzing them.

Our expectation is that by providing students with learning environments equipped with appropriate social software we can support students’ collaborative inquiry process described by Bell et al. (2010). During the course students were instructed to make research concerning forest ecology. For this purpose we built a learning environment allowing the use of blogs, tags, spreadsheets and tools for following purposes:
1.      Building  picture blogs as shared databases of flora in the investigated ecotypes
2.      Classifying the pictures/plants using central biological concepts by tagging
3.      Building a shared representation of the diversity of flora using online spreadsheets
4.      Analysing the above data and building research reports as web pages

Research questions were:

How did students experience the use of social software tools for collaborative inquiry?
How did the use of online tools and scaffolds support disciplinary ways of working and reporting in inquiry?

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