Because prior beliefs can affect how people argue and respond to controversial claims, in this study we examined how patterns in students' responses posted in online debates were associated with students' initial positions on given claims prior to debate. Students that held initial opposing positions to the claim exhibited the tendency to respond…

Supporting collaborative discourse with discussion forums in a typical Learning Management System (LMS) remains challenging. This article reports on a design case of an "unLMS" approach, which aimed to devise a networked learning environment not based on an LMS for collaborative discourse in an online course. To support such discourse,…

Critical pedagogy employs dialogue that is embodied, reflective, and authentic with aims to promote action toward social justice. Although online learning is well suited to support several characteristics of critical dialogue (i.e., participant diversity, student discussions, emphasis on reflection), it can also be impersonal and disembodied. The…

Researchers have argued that Twitter has potential to support high-quality professional development (PD) that can respond to teachers' questions and concerns just in time and "on the spot." Yet, very little attention has been paid to instances where Twitter has made just-in-time learning possible. In this paper, we examine one instance…

The purpose of this study was to investigate teachers' beliefs regarding the integration of technologies from the 2011 K-12 edition of the "Horizon Report" into their local, public school contexts. Teachers read the "Horizon Report" and then participated in an asynchronous, threaded discussion focusing on technologies they…

Online learning at the K-12 level has been growing dramatically over the past decade in the United States and worldwide. Proceeding on a similar trajectory, the use of charter schools as a means to provide education choice in the United States has also grown. These two paths have converged in many instances to form online or virtual charter…

This paper presents a study which involved researching student interaction and participation under the lens of Activity Theory and Social Computing. Activity Theory is a philosophical framework that integrates the objective, the sociocultural, and the ecological, while Social Computing describes any type of computing application in which software…

Reflection and professional development are two key practices that characterize an effective teacher and that are frequently overlooked in preservice training (Bowles, 2003; Halen-Faber, 1997; Patrick & Reinhartz, 1999). Reflection can be defined as the type of thinking that serves to challenge notions of prior learning (Halen-Faber, 1997), and…