<p><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">This study looks at the effect of a cross-cultural instructional approach on the learners&rsquo / conceptions of lightning and attitude towards science. It explored Basotho conceptions of lightning and thunder under the following themes: nature of lightning, protection against lightning, animalistic/humanistic behaviour of lighting and nature of wounds inflicted by lightning.</p> </font></p>

This thesis is a part of a project, “Interactive Learning in Distance Education”, funded by The Swedish Research Council. The overall purpose was, from adult distance learners’ perspective, to describe, analyse and understand factors influencing studies and interactive learning in asynchronous computer-mediated learning environments. Da¬ta were collected in 2003; from 62 students (56 women and six men) attending an undergraduate and a supplementary distance cour¬se within the teacher training program. The study was based on questionnaires, diaries, portfolios, interviews and transcriptions of students’ postings to the computer conferences FirstClass and Web¬Board, respectively. The courses included campus meetings and individual studies accompanied by study guides containing reading instructions, timetables and individual as well as group-related assign¬ments. Asynchronous text-based, computer-mediated commu¬nication (CMC) was used for dialogue among the participants. The results indicate that difficulties to combine studies with commitments in the students’ everyday lives and lack of familiarity with higher education and computer mediated distance education constituted learning obstacles. Almost everyone emphasised the importance of communicaion with peer students for feeling satisfied in the study and learning situation. They appreciated the asynchronous text-based CMC because it increased the flexibility of the studies. The students´ online behaviour and statements also indicate feelings of social presence and solidarity with peer learners, despite using a medium with relatively low capacity to convey social cues. Female and male students described similar difficulties of combining family, work and study. Women sho¬wed lower self-esteem in terms of computer skills and coping with their studies. They highlighted the social importance of the studygroup to a higher extent than the men did. The ideal course design in terms of structure, dialogue and autonomy altered depending on students´ perceptions of benefits. They wanted flexibility and autonomy to be able to combine the studies with commitments in their everyday life, at the same time they appreciated elements of structure and governance in situations when these involved saving of time. The communication in the computer conferences was extensive but the analysis of the learners’ contributions provides little evidence of effective collaborative learning activities. Several reasons to this were discussed, e.g. students´ lack of time and knowledge to form functioning learning communities, as well as insufficient course design to promote and support collaborative distance learning. It was concluded that there is a gap between teachers' ambitions to create an interactive learning environment on the one hand, and students´ skills, attitudes to collaboration and need to share their time between studies and other commitments on the other. Also, teachers´ ambitions to develop distance education aiming at collaboration and interactive learning are often hampered by their limited skills and time frames to design and implement such courses. / Interactive Learning in Distance Education

Schools have organized professional learning communities to support teacher learning and hopefully student achievement. An investigation of these learning communities may provide a description of professional teacher learning and suggest implications and implementation processes. The following question guided this inquiry: In collaborative groups, what learning is recognized by teachers and what do teachers think facilitates that learning? The qualitative study investigated how teachers that participate in collaborative teams describe the learning process. The teachers responded to interview questions following observations of team meetings. The findings reveal what teachers perceive about their learning. The findings suggest the qualities of the learning situations for the teachers, the learning as recognized by the teachers, and the changes in practices that the teachers implemented in the classroom. The study implies and/or suggests processes and procedures to guide and enhance teacher learning in collaborative groups.

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Los entornos colaborativos educacionales, así como las herramientas educacionales están tomando grandes repercusiones en nuestra sociedad, llevándose a cabo en la actualidad numerosos proyectos de investigación acerca de su construcción y su uso en comunidades educacionales. Las investigaciones llevadas a cabo durante estos años han estado basadas en la creación de entornos colaborativos y su aplicación en entornos educacionales, a través de las cuales se han realizado una serie de estudios sobre las ventajas y desventajas que proporcionan dichos entornos, tanto a nivel de arquitectura como a nivel de herramientas.Con lo cual uno de los objetivos de nuestro trabajo de investigación es ofrecer una plataforma colaborativa genérica que puede ser aplicada a cualquier ámbito colaborativo incluyendo el aprendizaje por descubrimiento. Para ello se han estudiado las principales tecnologías y las distintas plataformas existentes obteniendo a partir de ello los elementos necesarios para la creación de un entorno colaborativo genérico. Con el fin de consolidar dichos elementos mostramos como se han aplicado al desarrollo de aplicaciones y plataformas dentro del ámbito de dos proyectos europeos, ITCOLE y COLAB. / Earning collaborative environments as well as learning tools have taken a prominent relevance in society, producing a growth of research projects regarding the building and the use of this system in education area. During the last years the research in this area has been focused on the building of different kinds of collaborative platforms and its usage in the educational arena, providing different kinds of studies which indicate the advantages and disadvantages of the use of them. These studies have covered the architecture of these systems and the use of them. Therefore, the aim of this research is to provide a generic collaborative environment which can be applied to any area, including discovery learning. For that reason, we have studied the main technologies and platforms for obtaining the elements needed in the building of a generic collaborative environment. Moreover, we have included these elements in the development regarding two European projects, ITCOLE and COLAB.

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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