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Primary and secondary school students (Setzer, Lewis, and Greene, 2005), college students (I. E. Allen and Seaman, 2003, 2004), and corporate employees (Galvin, 2002) are all engaging more and more in some form of online or blended online/face-to-face education. Given the large number of pedagogical and design choices that we must make, however, where do we begin when designing new environments? I argue that its important for us to consider how technological design choices interact with pedagogical choices and cognitive states to affect learning behaviors. To illustrate this, I examine the impact of synchronous chat media on educational discussions. Specifically, I ask two questions: (1) Since research has often reported that chat environments promote conversational equity (e.g., Warschauer, 1997), which features of synchronous text-based chat seem to help create conversational equity? and (2) how does this change impact the content of small group discussions? Using ethnographic-style observations and quasi-experimental studies, I show how changing conversational media influences (or doesnt) the resulting discussion among students. I present three results: * Certain properties of the chat medium seem to discourage conversational dominance by any one individual through (a) denying that individual mechanisms to control the conversational floor and (b) reducing the inhibition felt by shy or otherwise disempowered students. * The choice of medium does not seem to affect the quality of discussion content nearly as much as other variables. * Efficiency is diminished in chatrooms; achieving quality discussions online requires significantly more time because (a) typing is slower than speaking and (b) students are able to do other, parallel activities while engaging in a chat discussion. In the conclusion, I examine the broader implications of these findings for the design of conversational environments, whether for educational or business use.

Books and paper prints are the most common learning medium we used to have. However, content knowledge represented in books and paper prints is static, which limits the manifestation of complex and abstract concepts. Integrating smartphone with books makes it possible to incorporate varieties of digital materials fetched from the Internet to complement the content of books and paper prints and enrich the learning activities. Collaborative learning has been recognized as an effective instructional strategy. Individual learners learn through continuous conversation with group peers for knowledge sharing and knowledge construction. However, it has also been reported that the lack of proper procedural facilitation may undermine the learning performance of collaboration. To ensure that every learner in a group can best contribute to peer collaboration, a procedural scaffold was designed and implemented. The scaffolded procedure consists of four stages in peer collaboration, including individual learning, individual problem solving, group discussion, and group decision-making, in which the stage of individual problem solving was a critical step but was often ignored. In this study, a new paper-based learning system integrated with digital materials was designed and implemented for enhancing face-to-face collaborative learning. The procedural scaffold was implemented using a smartphone. The results showed that the facilitation of the procedural scaffolding enabled groups to perform significantly better in resolving ill-structured problems, promoted higher-level discourse in group discussions, and fostered individuals¡¦ deep understanding. Relevant issues about student learning using the new system were discussed, and future research to improve this study was suggested.

It is critical to have frequent interactions an important factor in web-based learning in order to achieve better performance. Because it is easier to interact within a smaller group, many web-based classes divide all students into several groups in order to raise the frequencies of interactions. Therefore, web-based learning combined with virtual team has become a new learning model. Based on the observations on a web-based class, it is found that the frequencies and contents of interactions among classmates and among group members are different. However, so far, none of researches have focused on such phenomena. This research tries to explore the relationships between the interactions within the class and interactions within the group, and how these interactions relate to web-based learning performance. The data of this research is collected from a web-based class of NSYSU (http://cu.nsysu.edu.tw). There are 8 groups in the class. Each student is allowed to post articles on Class Discuss Board as well as Group Discuss Board. First, based on content analysis research method, all articles are classified into several types. Then the relationships between interactions within class and interactions within groups are examined by statistical analysis. It results in ten important and interesting findings.

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Distance learning is one of the most important forces driving educational reform today. Headlines touting the benefits of educational technology are commonplace in journal articles and newspaper and television reports. In the past five years, we have seen an explosion in the number of computer-mediated courses offered at two- and four-year institutions. An area of particular growth has been that of asynchronous online instruction. This growth has spurred the development of a new construct, the study of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). Research on collaborative learning within the setting of online instruction is limited and anecdotal at best. Emergent research on CSCL shows learners in this learning environment are not isolated. It is a vibrant network of people--an interactive learning community--that is not limited by time, place, or the constraints of a classroom. Examination of the practical application of this theory is critical, especially when withdrawal rates for distance learning courses can range from 30-80%. Therefore, there is a need to understand the experiences and perceptions of distant learning students and the instructional strategies used by faculty within the online classroom where the social and cultural context of the learning community is created. The purpose of this qualitative study was to observe the pedagogical practices used by online instructors and examine the perceptions and characteristics of those students taking community college online courses. Then, compare this finding to what research says is needed for online instruction to support and foster computer supported collaborative learning. This study focused on four community college instructors who teach web-based courses in English, developmental mathematics, history and management. The study also examined the demographics of the students taking these online courses in order to provide a descriptive background of the participants and to assess their perceptions and experiences. The research questions addressed in this study were: 1) What pedagogical strategies do instructors teaching online courses use?; 2) How do online instructors promote collaborative learning communities?; and 3) What are the learning experiences of the students who take online courses? / text

Technical fields such as computer science and software engineering have placed an emphasis on collaboration and teamwork, and training students entering these fields is a challenge that educators and researchers have attempted to tackle. To develop students’ skills for these technical fields, some educators have integrated learning activities where students collaborate heavily and make contributions to each other’s learning, emulating the type of work students will perform in industry. Consequently, the learning tools that instructors use for their courses need to support these collaborative and contributive activities. GitHub is a social coding tool that has seen rapid adoption in the software development field because of the open, collaborative workflow it encourages. This thesis explores the use of GitHub as a collaborative platform for computer science and software engineering education. GitHub provides users with opportunities to contribute to each other’s work through its transparency features, supports integrated discussions, and provides support for reusing and remixing work—opportunities which may be extended to education. In this thesis, I investigate how GitHub’s unique features, such as ‘pull requests’ and commit histories, can be used to support learning and teaching. This work also explores the benefits and challenges that emerge from using GitHub in this context from both the instructor’s and the student’s perspectives. We found that GitHub afforded instructors with opportunities to encourage student participation by contributing to the course materials through the use of ‘pull requests’ and provided instructors with ways to reuse and share their course materials. As well, students gained experience with a tool and a workflow they expected to encounter in industry, and were provided ways to further engage in their learning by giving feedback to or further developing other students’ work. However, we found that instructors and students were challenged by GitHub’s lack of educational focus, as well as the implications of using GitHub’s open workflow on the public availability of student work. Findings from this work determine the viability of GitHub as a tool for supporting computer science and software engineering education, and contribute to our understanding of what activities and benefits GitHub provides beyond traditional learning tools. The contributions of this work include a set of recommendations for instructors wishing to use GitHub to augment their courses, utilizing GitHub’s features to support educational activities such as student contributions to course materials and providing continuous feedback to students. / Graduate / 0984 / 0710 / noelf@uvic.ca

The purpose of this study was to investigate how Scardamalia’s (2002) socio-cognitive determinants of knowledge building emerge in a computer-supported collaborative writing task, and to understand students’ perceptions of knowledge building experience and the use of tools, including wikis, to support the collaborative writing process. The setting of this study was a graduate level online course on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), in which all course activities were conducted collaboratively in an online environment. Data sources included: transcripts of online inputs in the wiki areas; interviews with 15 participants; participants’ reflective journals; transcripts of asynchronous online discussions and synchronous chats. Data were analyzed using content analysis for the transcripts of wiki areas and grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) was used in the analysis of data from the interviews. Results of the data analysis indicated that the three groups in this study participated in the collaborative knowledge building activity in different ways. The three factors that influenced their participation in the activity included: group dynamics, collaborative writing task, and collaborative writing tools. These factors interacted with each another and impacted their knowledge building discourse in the following ways: improvable ideas, constructive use of authoritative sources, epistemic agency, and embedded and transformative assessment. As a result of their engagement in knowledge building discourse, participants successfully completed the collaborative writing project and shared a strong sense of community and co-ownership of the knowledge product. The findings of this study may shed light on the strategies and environmental factors that encourage knowledge building discourse as well as the synergetic combination of technology tools and knowledge building task. In addition, understanding the process of knowledge building in a computer-supported collaborative writing task and the participants perception of knowledge building and the use of tools may help instructor better prepare learners to become collaborative learners and effective knowledge workers. / text

Social interaction is a powerful medium in education. In this report, I discuss how computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) helps K-12 students to enhance learning. I discussed why socio-constructivism in CSCL is a promising learning method. In addition I suggest that CSCL enhances students’ self-driven learning, motivation, and critical thinking. I also examine how CSCL can be successfully implemented in K-12 schools. In this context, the report identifies the challenges posed by technology implementation and changing teachers’ beliefs in introducing this innovation into schools, and how those challenges can be met. Finally, based on perspectives in support of CSCL, the paper does a critical analysis of the Korean e-learning project, which created a national online leaning network for K-12 students, called Cyber Home Learning System (CHLS), and suggests ways that CSCL may enhance this program. / text