Shared meaning-making across differences in today's polarized society requires a socio-political perspective toward conceptualizing and operationalizing collaborative competence. Thus, there is a pressing need for socio-political pedagogies and designs in CSCL to empower students as cultural-historical agents who can communicate and work…

This paper explores a labelling feature designed to support higher-level online dialogue. It investigates whether students use labels less often during a structured online dialogue than during an unstructured one, and looks at students' reactions to labelling and to both types of tasks. Participants are from three successive course offerings of a…

In this paper, we present findings on moderation of synchronous, small-group argumentation in blended, co-located learning environments. Drawing on findings from the literature on human facilitation of dialogue in face-to-face settings, we first elaborate on the potential promise of this new practice. However, little is known about what…

Chat conversations and other types of online communication environments are widely used within CSCL educational scenarios. However, there is a lack of theoretical and methodological background for the analysis of collaboration. Manual assessing of non-moderated chat discussions is difficult and time-consuming, having as a consequence that learning…

This article describes the impact of learning in asynchronous discussion groups on students' levels of knowledge construction. A design-based approach enabled the comparison of two successive cohorts of students (N = 223 and N = 286) participating in discussion groups for one semester. Multilevel analyses were applied to uncover the influence of…

This paper introduces an approach to analyzing temporal patterns of knowledge construction (KC) in online discussions, including consequences of role assignments. The paper illustrates the power of this approach for illuminating collaborative processes using data from a semester-long series of discussions in which 21 university students were…

This paper argues for a need to develop methods for examining temporal patterns in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) groups. It advances one such quantitative method--Lag-sequential Analysis (LsA)--and instantiates it in a study of problem-solving interactions of collaborative groups in an online, synchronous environment. LsA…

Although protocol analysis can be an important tool for researchers to investigate the process of collaboration and communication, the use of this method of analysis can be time consuming. Hence, an automatic coding procedure for coding dialogue acts was developed. This procedure helps to determine the communicative function of messages in online…

A system for "anchored discussion" is compared with a system for traditional forum discussion (Blackboard), and their collaborative and communicative affordances for the collaborative processing of academic texts are investigated. Results show that discussion in the system for anchored discussion is more directed at processing the meaning of texts…