The effective use of technology is increasingly important in many fields where online and digital communication, collaboration, and production have become more prevalent. Although it is clear that many higher education students come into the classroom with skills involved with consuming technology, they often are much less capable of producing…

The explosion of technology and information has resulted in major changes in education in the twenty-first century. School librarians have a vital role to play in efforts to ensure that students are equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed and participate in the digital society of the twenty-first century. This role presents an…

For more than a decade practitioners have promoted professional learning communities (PLCs) as an effective structure for providing teachers with professional development (Chappuis, Chappuis, & Stiggins, 2009; DuFour, Eaker, & DuFour, 2005). These collaborative networks are believed to be effective because they expose teachers to new ideas…

Professional learning communities (PLCs)--teams of educators who get together regularly to exchange ideas--have sprung up to meet school districts' growing interest in promoting professional development that engages teachers and administrators. PLCs meet to develop lesson plans, monitor student progress, assess instructional effectiveness, and…

Understanding the dynamics of individual or group adaptation can provide valuable information for constructing professional development strategies to increase chances of instructional success. This paper reports on an exploratory study that identifies indicators of convergent vs. non-convergent adaptation in two cases of teachers working together…

This paper explores the process of knowledge convergence and knowledge sharing in the context of classroom collaboration in which students do a group learning activity mediated by a generic representation tool. In analysing the transcript of the interactions of a group, we adapt the group cognition method of Stahl and the uptake analysis…

This study explored the differences among online elementary school student groups based on their communication features. Two hundred and ninety-one Taiwanese students, ranging in age from 11 to 12 years old, participated in this study. The students were randomly arranged within-class into three-member groups. Each group was asked to use a…

In this paper we explore how primary school children "learn to collaborate" and "collaborate to learn" on creative writing projects by using diverse cultural artefacts--including oracy, literacy and ICT. We begin by reviewing some key sociocultural concepts which serve as a theoretical framework for the research reported. Secondly, we describe the…

This study reports the impact of high sensitivity to early exchange in 11th-grade, CSCL triads solving well- and ill-structured problems in Newtonian Kinematics. A mixed-method analysis of the evolution of participation inequity (PI) in group discussions suggested that participation levels tended to get locked-in relatively early on in the…

In this paper, we consider an approach to developing critically thoughtful e-Learning communities of practice--where participants are deliberate about the use of specific intellectual tools supporting critical thinking. We address Garrison & Anderson's (2003) argument that such critical thinking should play a central role within the ecology of…

This study was about a single case of educational innovation and excellence in educational technology in a secondary school in Ontario. The researcher explored the question of how the innovation resulted from an individual effort and attainment remained a "contained entity" after its decade-long existence. From the lenses of multiple…

One of the most important decisions to be made in a face-to-face collaborative learning activity is how the participating groups are composed. These compositions produce different learning and social interaction results. The ability to change the group member composition in real time and dynamically enables the leveling up of learning results and…

Since past studies showing that competition has negative effects on group process were primarily conducted in traditional classrooms involving face-to-face situations, this study extends past research by investigating whether the negative effects associated with face-to-face team competition can be mitigated with the support of networking…

For the twenty-sixth year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the National AECT Convention in Anaheim, CA. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two volumes.…

This document presents the proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia (MERGA). The theme of this conference is "Navigating Currents and Charting Directions." The theme reminds us that, although we are constantly pushed to account for the quality and impact of our research, we…