This paper examines the temporal and ethical affordances of commercial social media platforms, such as Twitter, as tools for engaging in social research and knowledge exchange. Drawing on activity that took place during the "New Frontiers in Qualitative Longitudinal Research" seminar series, the article reports on using Twitter and other…

Describes the nature of online chats in terms of how graduate students structured their conversations in online group discussions, and how they participated and conversed in and across concurrent conversations. Characteristics of the computer medium contributed to the conversational structures and the kinds of structures affected interactivity and…

Early views considered computer-mediated discussions (CMDs) to be ideal forums for fostering dialogue because women and other marginalized groups could be equal participants. However, such optimistic views have been tempered by research that found CMD to be dominated by a few individuals, often men, and discourse that is sometimes abusive. The…

This article elaborates a model for understanding pedagogy in online educational forums. The model identifies four key components. Intellectual engagement describes the foreground cognitive processes of collaborative learning. Communication processes operating in the background accumulate an ever richer store of shared understandings that enable…