This case study explored the educational experiences of Canadian preservice teachers in a course designed to teach about online teaching. Students gained experience in course design and delivery, and safe and ethical behavior related to technology. Findings indicated that projects in which students actively applied their knowledge were more…

This paper presents a quantitative approach to multimodal discourse analysis for analyzing online collaborative learning. The coding framework draws together the fields of systemic functional linguistics and Activity Theory to analyze interactions between collaborative-, content- and technology-related discourse. The approach is used to examine…

The present study attempted to investigate whether young learners who were new to knowledge building approaches could work towards advancing both individual and collective knowledge, and whether knowledge building could be beneficial to both high-achieving and low-achieving students. Findings reported in this paper are from one and a half-year…

This paper argues for understanding ICT from the standpoint of philosophical world views. We present a framework, based on Pepper's root-metaphors (Formism, Contextualism, Mechanism, Organicism, and Animism/Mysticism) and we illustrate the use of the framework by looking at a common example of ICT: e-mail. It is argued that such a framework is…

This study examined how message-response exchanges produced in the interactions between active learners only, reflective learners only, active-reflective learners and reflective-active learners affected how often active versus reflective learners posted rebuttals to arguments and challenges across four types of exchanges that believed to promote…

Group projects are common in undergraduate chemical engineering course. Wikis are a new medium for group projects because they are Webpages that are edited using the same software used to view the Webpage. Advantages include the ability to record changes made by each individual (helpful for grading), ability to continuously monitor progress, and a…

This article discusses an ongoing study into issues relevant to the design of learning objects for educational applications via portable digital assistant (PDA) technology. The specific areas of inquiry in this study are: the kinds of learning objects that are effective for PDA delivery; contexts for their effective educational applications; and…

Distance-learning courses were classified with regard to their use of computer-mediated interaction and the degree to which such interaction was integrated into the curriculum and the assessment regime. This produced four groups of courses varying according to their use of interaction and integration. The impact of interaction and integration was…

In this paper we explore the dispositions towards "communal e-learning" of a cohort of initial teacher trainees within a primary post-graduate (PGCE) programme. We describe a one-year case study involving 154 postgraduate trainees in West London, working to meet the nationally decreed "professional standards" for qualified…

Asynchronous online discussion is used in a variety of ways, both in online learning environments and in traditional teaching environments where, increasingly frequently, a blended approach is adopted. However the anticipated benefits of this tool in improving student learning outcomes are still being debated. One of the many factors affecting the…

One of the challenges of teacher education is to train preservice teachers to deliver a wide range of literacy skills to a diverse population. This article describes a mixed methods research study into preservice undergraduate literacy methods courses. This research examined how online, asynchronously conducted discussions influenced and impacted…

A literacy education professor teams up with a colleague whose specialization is technology and education to analyze students' contributions to a graduate course taught online for the first time. This article explains the modifications that the instructor made to a face-to-face course to adapt it to an online learning environment. The online…

Although a number of studies have reported on the positive effects of Internet chats in the second language classroom, to the best of my knowledge no studies to date have examined the effect of text-based chats on oral fluency development. This exploratory study addressed the above question by examining the oral fluency development of 34 English…

The purpose of this article is to present the results of a study conducted to investigate how the attributes of 3-D technology such as avatars, 3-D space, and comic style bubble dialogue boxes affect participants' social, cognitive, and teaching presences in a blended problem-based learning environment. The community of inquiry model was adopted…

The study investigates whether the informal interactive written discourse in instant messaging (IM) is permeating the more formal writing of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) college students, and how students' identities are constructed in terms of English multiliteracies in Taiwan. The study is designed as a qualitative case study. The…