The purpose of this study was to explore group forming strategies by examining participation behaviours during whole class discussions associated with active participation in a following small group activity. Written communication data, posted in class discussion forums (843 messages/70,432 words) and small group forums (732 messages/59,394…

Understanding the dynamics of individual or group adaptation can provide valuable information for constructing professional development strategies to increase chances of instructional success. This paper reports on an exploratory study that identifies indicators of convergent vs. non-convergent adaptation in two cases of teachers working together…

Students and faculty are grappling with learning teams in the online environment - more than half of all higher education organizations offer online courses (Hoffman, 2006). As online course developers try to replicate the best practices of traditional classrooms, the asynchronous technology of the Internet has added great capability while also…

A common challenge in many situations of computer-supported collaborative learning is increasing the willingness of those involved to share their knowledge with other group members. As a prototypical situation of computer-supported information exchange, a shared-database setting was chosen for the current study. This information-exchange situation…

Current distance education benefits greatly from educational software that makes group work possible for students who are separated in time and space. However, some students prefer distance education because they can work on their own. This paper explores how students react to expectations on behalf of the course provider to do their assignments…

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…

Per definition, CSCL research deals with the data of individuals nested in groups, and the influence of a specific learning setting on the collaborative process of learning. Most well-established statistical methods are not able to analyze such nested data adequately. This article describes the problems which arise when standard methods are…

This paper describes the development of augmented group awareness tools that take mutual user ratings of their online discussion contributions as input, aggregate these data, and visually feed these data back to the members in real time, thereby informing participants about how the group as a whole perceives their contributions. A specific group…

Used ethnographic methods to examine, over six months, the relationship between gender and open-ended computer software use to compose stories for 36 first graders. Found that females in mixed-gender groups were more likely to have their competence or work laughed at or criticized than when working alone or in all-female groups. Females used…