Social-media-based teacher learning networks have the affordance to grant flexibility of time and space for teachers' professional learning, support the development and sustainability of social networking, and meet their just-in-time needs for exchanging knowledge, negotiating meaning and accessing resources. However, most existing research on…

Background: Change strategies may leverage interpersonal relationships and conversations to spread teaching innovations among science faculty. Knowledge sharing refers to the process by which individuals transfer information and thereby spread innovative ideas within an organization. We use knowledge sharing as a lens for identifying factors that…

The various types of interactions that students carry out when engaged in scientific argumentation function together to move forward developing ideas and support sensemaking. As such, incorporating argumentation in classroom instruction holds promise for supporting students in developing and acting with an epistemic agency, being positioned, and…

Analysis of the linguistic discourse plays an important role in the social, cultural, ethnographic, and comparative studies of languages. Discourse markers as indispensable parts of this analysis are reportedly more common in informal speech than in written language. They could be used at different levels, i.e. as "linking words,"…

One of the problematic features of the "skills discourse" is the view that skills are decontextualized bits of knowledge and disposition. Instead, how skills such as communication are defined and used are shaped by cultural, political, and situational factors. In this article, we integrate theory from communication studies, critical…

Students live and work in worlds where virtual communities, such as those created via social network sites (e.g. Facebook) may interplay with their formal learning, but scholars of design pedagogy know little about how these spaces can support design learning. In this study, we describe how a set of informal communications, encapsulated in five…

Purpose: This paper aims to gather empirical evidence for what colleagues from different organizations reported they learned from informal professional learning conversations. Informal learning conversations with colleagues is a powerful yet understudied source of self-directed, professional development. Design/methodology/approach: This study of…

This work approaches the concept of social media engagement through a lens of participation theory. Following the work of Goffman (1981) and others, this dissertation uses the concepts of the participation framework and the participant role to explore engagement as a function of participation in interaction. The purposes of this dissertation are…

This study examined linguistic politeness behaviors and their relationship to social distance among members of a diasporic Bengali community on the social network site "Orkut"[R]. Using data from computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically text messages posted on "Orkut"[R] "scrapbooks," it developed a method to test the claims of the…

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the importance of the social dimensions of second language acquisition, there has been little research on second language (L2) use and learning in the social networks of foreign language learners. This study examines the language use of a student of Japanese in Australia in two informal conversations he had…

In this study, we explore the cognitive style profiles and linguistic patterns of self-organizing groups within a web-based graduate education course to determine how cognitive preferences and individual behaviors influence the patterns of information exchange and the formation of communication hierarchies in an online classroom. Network analysis…

Analysis of interaction patterns is one of the most important indicators of quality of learning in educational web forums. Social network analysis (SNA) is gradually assuming importance in the study of interaction patterns as it focuses on the analysis of the interrelationships between individuals, thus providing a holistic perspective on group…

Background: The aim of this study was to explore, from the perspective of key communication partners, the meaning of a communication intervention and associated changes for an adult with severe intellectual disability (ID). Method: The parents and key support workers of Mark, a 22-year-old man with ID and complex communication needs, were…