High-quality talk about issues that raise high-intensity emotions in the public sphere is timely needed. Still, researchers committed to the fostering of high-quality types of school talk generally disregard the role of emotions. We show that this disregard is not accidental and that it conveys a customary reluctance in schools to consider the…

Only a few studies have dealt with the challenge of bridging the linguistic gap between the dialogic realm and the talk of disengaged students. Bridging this gap is particularly relevant to the CSCL community since one of its utmost aims is to promote the dialogic. This study aims to articulate how to harness the CSCL design and affordances to…

This research explores the ability of grade 2 students to engage in productive discussion about the state of their knowledge building using group-level feedback tools to support their metadiscourse. Two aspects of knowledge work were common to the comparison and experimental classes: "Knowledge Building talk" (KB talk) involving…

We present an instructional model involving a computer-supported collaborative learning environment, in which students from two conflicting groups collaboratively investigate an event relevant to their past using historical texts. We traced one enactment of the model by a group comprised of two Israeli Jewish and two Israeli Arab students. Our…

The use and effects of a CSCL-tool are not always predictable from the properties of the tool alone, but depend on how that tool is appropriated. This paper presents the findings from a case study about the appropriation of a graphical shared workspace. When students are presented with a new tool they may encounter competing constraints and…

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…