Learning on and through social media is becoming a cornerstone of lifelong learning, creating places not only for accessing information, but also for finding other self-motivated learners. Such is the case for Reddit, the online news sharing site that is also a forum for asking and answering questions. We studied learning practices found in 'Ask'…

This article explicates the ways that the popular television series "Sons of Anarchy" in conjunction with our content analysis coding tool can be used to teach theories and concepts central to Sociology of Deviance courses. We detail how students learned to understand deviance as a social constructed phenomenon by coding and analyzing…

The authors present three strategies for making sense of students' mathematical thinking. These lenses make the abstract idea of "making sense of student thinking" more manageable and concrete. We start by taking an initial look at a student's idea, going deeper, and finally looking across several ideas.

Responsive teaching occurs when teachers take up and "respond" to their students' ideas during instruction (J. L. Pierson, 2008). Although responsive teaching is gaining recognition as an effective strategy for encouraging student learning, few methods of analysis are capable of characterizing the different ways in which teachers take up…

This article describes an undergraduate Participatory Action Research (PAR) course in which students with and without intellectual disabilities collaborated as co-researchers in order to explore various aspects of the university experience. The article describes the university course as well as presents results of the students' PAR projects. The…

At the suggestion of a colleague, I read "The Code Book", [32], by Simon Singh to get a basic introduction to the RSA encryption scheme. Inspired by Singh's book, I designed a Ball State University Honors Colloquium in Mathematics for both majors and non-majors, with material coming from "The Code Book" and many other sources. This course became…

The five stage cycle model is an interactive flash platform that proposes a challenging scenario with associated questions about light wave features and correlations. As the students navigate from stage to stage, they are able to access some related resources and engage in small group discussions. The students are able to revisit their responses…

Discussion of electronic discussion groups as an instructional technique addresses the dilemma of whether instructors should associate assessment schemes with the electronic discussion forum. Presents a coding technique as an example of how assessment can potentially promote substantive electronic discussions. (Author/LRW)

In CSCL research, collaboration through chat has primarily been studied in dyadic settings. This article discusses three issues that emerged during the development of a multi-dimensional coding procedure for small-group chat communication: (a) the unit of analysis and unit fragmentation, (b) the reconstruction of the response structure and (c)…

Technology offers promising opportunities for creating new types of classroom learning environments. This paper describes three technology models used by teacher education interns: electronic portfolios, negotiative concept mapping, cognote-supported electronic discussions. As implemented in the current study, these models invoke graduated…

This paper provides an illustrative example of an approach to creating and reporting individual profiles of engagement in particular behaviours in an online asynchronous discussion (OAD). Individual results of analysis of transcripts of an OAD can provide insights different from those gained by focusing on aggregate measures of group behaviours.…

In support of research examining relationships between learner characteristics and the quality of online discussions, this paper surveys different methods for evaluating discussions. The paper will present coding methods used in our own research as well as methods used by others interested in quality online discussions. Key topics include what…