Shared meaning-making across differences in today's polarized society requires a socio-political perspective toward conceptualizing and operationalizing collaborative competence. Thus, there is a pressing need for socio-political pedagogies and designs in CSCL to empower students as cultural-historical agents who can communicate and work…

Theoretical models of collaborative learning through online discussions presuppose that students generally attend to others' posts. However, a succession of studies over the last decade has shown this assumption to be unwarranted. Instead, research indicates that learners attend to others' posts in diverse and particular ways--an…

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…

We conducted research within a program serving future mathematics and science teachers. Groups of teachers worked primarily online in an asynchronous discussion environment on a 6-week task in which they applied learning-science ideas acquired from an educational psychology course to design interdisciplinary instructional units. We employed an…

The authors work as online tutors for a BSc (Hons) physiotherapy programme at Coventry University in the United Kingdom. This paper represents a stage in our developing understanding, over a 3 year period, of the impact of group dynamics on online interaction among physiotherapy students engaged in sharing with their peers their first experiences…