Educational practices are constantly adjusting to technological advances, in order to improve their effectiveness in delivering knowledge and preparing students for the challenges of modern digital society. Electronic games and augmented reality environments are two such media that can shape powerful modes of interactive and immersive experiences.…

Background: Historically, significant advances in scientific understanding have followed advances in measurement and observation. As the resolving power of an instrument increased, so have gains in the understanding of the phenomena being observed. Modern interactive systems are potentially the new "microscopes" when they are…

In this paper we examine how two groups of middle school students arrive at shared understandings of and solutions to mathematical problems. Our data consists of logs of student participation in the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) system as they work on math problems. The project supports interaction both through chat and through a virtual whiteboard. We…

Background: Previous research has revealed the existence of gender differences in physical education. Most descriptive studies show that boys are more physically active than girls, have greater self-perception of enjoyment and competence in physical education, attach more importance to sports and participation in them and demonstrate higher game…

Learners are multi-faceted, unique people. Discovering the whole individual is incumbent upon realizing the teaching/learning environments, common social and societal realities, and belief and value systems respective of academic and socio-societal factors that establish who one is as a learner and teacher. In "Learning and Teaching," the authors…

Tangible technologies and shared interfaces create new paradigms for mediating collaboration through dynamic, synchronous environments, where action is as important as speech for participating and contributing to the activity. However, interaction with shared interfaces has been shown to be inherently susceptible to peer interference, potentially…

There is considerable agreement about the fact that the presence of researchers in the classroom mediates teaching and learning. Why "should" two very different forms of human activity, one designed to study the other, interact and mediate each other? In this article, we propose cultural-historical activity theory as a framework for understanding…

The reported exploratory study consisted primarily of classroom visits, videotaped sessions, and post-treatment interviews whereby second graders (n = 12) worked on problems in planar geometry, individually and in triads, using physical and virtual manipulatives. The goal of the study was to: 1) characterize the nature of geometric thinking found…

Teachers' lounges are often thought as places that breed negativity. This two-year ethnography conducted in the United States explored teachers' interactions within teachers' lounges and congregational spaces. This article discusses that an important occurrence in these spaces, professional knowledge sharing, took place instead of perpetual…

Young people are often referred to as digital natives, who are familiar with digital technologies such as computers, the Internet and mobile phones for communication, entertainment and accessing information. As a result scholars have called for an educational approach that bypasses the traditional unidirectional lecture teaching style, and applies…

This exploratory study analyzes how students use different communication modes to share information, negotiate meaning and construct knowledge in the process of doing a group learning activity in a Primary Grade 5 blended learning environment in Singapore. Small groups of students interacted face-to-face over a computer-mediated communication…

This paper presents a methodology of discovering social action patterns in collaborative learning activities for use in improving activity design, and in particular for restructuring existing designs involving face-to-face social actions to enhance their social dynamics and thus better ensure the achievement of a specified aim. An activity in this…

This article reports on the construction process of inclusion/exclusion for high school chemistry students in two schools in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais State, Brazil. We examined the interactional accomplishment of inclusion/exclusion of four students, two from a private school and two from a public school. The aim of this article…

Schools generally have been unable to keep up with the rapid technical changes in modern society. As a result, primary school age children worldwide are becoming self-taught independent e-learners and the gap between what they know and are able to do exceeds the learning outcomes for their schools' ICT (information communication technology)…

This paper deploys notions of emergence, connections, and designs for learning to conceptualize high school students' interactions when using online social media as a learning environment. It makes links to chaos and complexity theories and to fractal patterns as it reports on a part of the first author's action research study, conducted while she…