The hashtag #justsaying is one of Twitter's global stock hashtags. The hashtag is nontopical and appears to fulfil a complex range of metapragmatic framing functions. In this paper, I shall look at Dutch-language tweets in which the hashtag is being used as a fully enregistered 'translingual' framing device, and I will attempt an analysis focused…

In Carolyn Miller's "Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre," she revisits her assertion that genres are cultural artifacts and questions the nature of the relationship between micro-level, individual speech acts, and macro-level genres and systems. To demonstrate this relationship, I analyze "meta-genre" accounts of…

The article explores how the Internet and email offer space for participants to think and make sense of their experiences in the qualitative research encounter. It draws on a research study that used email interviewing to generate online narratives to understand academic lives and identities through research encounters in virtual space. The…

This manuscript reports on a corpus-based comparison of native and nonnative graduate students' language production in an asynchronous learning environment. Using 486 discussion board postings from a five-year period (2009-2013), we analyzed the extent to which native and nonnative university students' writing differed in 10 measures of syntactic…

This article examines the comment culture that accompanies documentary films on YouTube as a site of (geo) political education. It considers how viewers try to teach each other about the proper "place" of critique in response to the global, national, and local rhetoric featured in one environmental documentary film. YouTube viewers use…

This article describes in detail a conversation analysis of conceptual change in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment. Conceptual change is an essential learning process in science education that has yet to be fully understood. While many models and theories have been developed over the last three decades, empirical data to…

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…

Internet-mediated intercultural discussions have been adopted for intercultural and second-language learning. However, the notion of community development in this context has received less attention. This study employs exchange structure (ES) analysis (Stubbs, M. (1983). "Discourse analysis." Oxford: Basil Blackwell) to investigate the…

This exploratory analysis examined the nature of asynchronous, text-based communication in peer-directed educational discussions. The nature of communication changed over time and women exhibited greater tendency for epistolary communication than men. Initial posts, which were expository in nature, focused on disseminating information whereas…

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…

This study investigated the effect of peer leadership on students' cognitive achievement in online asynchronous discussions. Undergraduate students from a large online course were randomly assigned into groups for four asynchronous discussions, with each group having two to three peer leaders. Results of the mixed-method analysis revealed that the…

The purpose of this article was to explore student participation patterns in online discussion boards related to their characteristics and question types. The characteristics of students enrolled in an online course and the impact of types of discussion questions on student posts were examined. During the 16 weeks of a course, the participation…

Our universities are becoming increasingly diverse at the same time as online asynchronous discussions (OADs) are emerging as the most important forum for computer mediated communication (CMC) in distance education. But there is shortage of studies that explore how graduate students from different ethnic, linguistic and cultural backgrounds use…

Analysis of interaction patterns is one of the most important indicators of quality of learning in educational web forums. Social network analysis (SNA) is gradually assuming importance in the study of interaction patterns as it focuses on the analysis of the interrelationships between individuals, thus providing a holistic perspective on group…

The authors report the results of a study that provides bases for comparison between the time necessary to participate in courses delivered asynchronously online and courses delivered in a traditional classroom setting. Weekly discussion threads from 21 sections of six courses offered as part of online, degree-granting, accredited, graduate…