This study examined the types of learning behaviors students demonstrated while performing inquiry tasks. It also explored the relationship between the learning behaviors and students' domain knowledge. We observed fourteen students in five groups during a ninth-grade biology course. Three types of learning behaviors (inquiry, collaborative, and…

The role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education is well recognised--learning environments where the ICT features included are being proposed for many years now. The Web Geometry Laboratory (WGL) innovates in proposing a blended learning, collaborative and adaptive learning Web-environment for geometry. It integrates a…

Sustained discourse is critical to the learning potential of online courses. And, while research has surfaced many factors that mediate interaction, it further suggests that sustained interaction remains elusive. In this paper, I propose that student facilitation may have an impact on the quality of facilitators' interactions following a week of…

The use of Web 2.0 technologies for knowledge management is invading the corporate sphere. The Web 2.0 is the most adopted knowledge transfer tool within knowledge intensive firms and is starting to be used for mentoring. This paper presents IM-TAG, a Web 2.0 tool, based on semantic technologies, for informal mentoring. The tool offers…

A synchronous blend of online learning and "face-to-face" teaching is becoming a feasible instructional approach in higher education with the advent of technology. Although this learning mode is not new in higher education, little research has been done to contextualise social presence experiences in which effects of interactions were…

We study project-based, technology-enhanced learning environments in higher education, which should produce, by means of specific mechanisms, learning outcomes in terms of transferable knowledge and learning-, thinking-, collaboration- and regulation-skills. Our focus is on the role of objects from professional practice serving as boundary objects…

This study explores how collaborative inquiry learning can be supported with multiple scaffolding agents in a real-life field trip context. In practice, a mobile peer-to-peer messaging tool provided meta-cognitive and procedural support, while tutors and a nature guide provided more dynamic scaffolding in order to support argumentative discussions…

Achieving student participation, it has been argued, is one of the most important challenges in distance education. This explorative study examines whether a synchronous communication medium, instant messaging (IM), may enable students to participate more actively in online group work. When comparing two groups that adopted IM with two groups that…