Fast-growing and evolving online content has enabled responsive curriculum updates to support students' learning of how to apply concepts to understand and solve real world problems. Written case studies have long served this purpose in a wide variety of disciplines, and many educators have seen value in presenting cases through the use of online…

This paper is a reflection of my own individualistic participation in the EDUC 5001G: Principles of Learning (PoL) class wiki assignment. Specifically, I investigate the need for increased scaffolding strategies to facilitate direct collaboration among its participants. In order to do this, I first conducted a preliminary examination of the…

This article provides an update to the author's overview of developments in second language (L2) online writing that he wrote in 2008. There has been renewed interest in L2 writing through the wide use of social media, along with the rising popularity of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and telecollaboration (class-based online exchanges).…

With the proliferation of digital media and other forms of technologically mediated communication, this article argues that critical multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing--particularly through interrogating mundane, everyday texts--have the potential to engage students with advocacy and its role in shaping public discourse. In this…

See, Say, Write is an adaptable classroom writing routine that teachers can use across a range of activities in the preschool classroom. This preschool writing routine offers an opportunity for teachers to build on a shared experience through engagement in rich conversation and writing. After a shared experience, teachers will provide a visual…

This paper presents an analysis of my experiences with a teaching activity that engages students in publishing in Wikipedia on issues relating to globalization. It begins with a short overview of some of the current debates revolving around teaching globalization, which lay ground for the assignment. I discuss how this teaching tool fits with a…

The importance of direct explicit instruction in secondary schools has been shown to improve student learning outcomes across the curriculum. The question then becomes one of whether adapting direct explicit instruction in post-secondary institutions would have the same impact on student grades. Graham and Perin (2007) identified eleven elements…

Internet users worldwide turn to Wikipedia, the web-based, open-content encyclopedia, for basic information on all subjects. There is much to concern an academic audience in the encyclopedia's prominence: bases for evidence are different from those used by scholars; no expertise is required to edit an article; the site is a target for…

Academic writing, individual or collaborative, is an essential skill for today's graduates. Unfortunately, managing writing activities and providing feedback to students is very labor intensive and academics often opt out of including such learning experiences in their teaching. We describe the architecture for a new collaborative writing support…

The use of social technologies, such as wikis and chats, has brought a renewed attention to L2 collaborative writing. Yet, a question that still remains to be answered is the extent to which learners' writing is enhanced when using these tools. By analyzing learners' individual and collaborative writing, this study (a) explores L2 learners'…

Composition teachers have generally embraced collaborative learning in the years since Kenneth Bruffee published his first article promoting its advantages in "College English" in 1972. But assigning collaboratively written papers in an introductory college writing course is still rare. This study assesses the benefits and drawbacks of assigning a…

Online collaborative writing tasks are frequently undertaken in forums and wikis. Variation between these two communication modes has yet to be examined, particularly type of feedback and its effects. We investigated the type of feedback and the impact of English native-speakers' feedback on Spanish peers' discourse restructuring in the context of…

In an action research project, young male students from Sydney, Australia and Richmond, USA contributed to a collaborative writing blog. Both groups of students shared the same text with their class teachers, while using the medium of collaborative blogging, a process which was facilitated and managed by the teacher-librarian. Data was gathered…

One critical issue arising in the educational use of collaborative learning concerns the teacher's difficulty in evaluating the contribution and participation of each student in group-work. This article aims to illustrate and discuss a methodology that enables evaluation of the collaborative learning process based on co-writing in a wiki…

This study reports findings from an experimental field study of scripted collaboration for net-based learning in the context of a one-semester university course on operating systems. In scripted collaboration, activities of learners are coordinated and guided according to particular rules, implemented via respective tools in the learning…