"Projet Mercure," or the Mercury Project, was a consortium of universities in North America that used videoconferencing to link with university classrooms in France; its purpose was to provide a new approach to teaching French language and civilization. This paper examines one such videoconference between both Austin Peay State…

This paper reports on an evaluation of InfoPoint, a centrally-managed, professionally staffed reference service available at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus Library through a variety of communication modes, including a World Wide Web form, direct e-mail, and chat and collaborative browsing. Over 400 InfoPoint users were sent a…

In January 1999, an interdisciplinary seminar of doctoral students from cognitive, educational and computational sciences was organized to study theoretical texts that might provide insight into how to support collaborative learning with perspectives-based software. The seminar uses a Web-based tool called WEBGUIDE to mediate and structure…

The GMD (German National Research Center for Information Technology) has developed the BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work) Shared Workspace system within the last four years with the goal of transforming the Web from a primarily passive information repository to an active cooperation medium. The BSCW system is a Web-based groupware tool for…

Experiences from a distance course conducted during 1996-97 for high-school teachers in Sweden and reports from other experiments have yielded the conclusion that collaborating via electronic conferencing systems demands new communication patterns. This paper uses theories about communication, group processes, and shared symbolic order and social…

This paper focuses on the rewards and pitfalls of offering an online Technology in Education program. The program structure, administrative support needs, student readiness issues, evaluation process, student benefits and concerns, logistics, technical needs, and teaching issues relating to offering an online program are presented. Concrete…

Educational research has long been conducted at a distance: both mail and telephone have successfully been used in survey research. The development of the Internet offers yet another medium over which research can be conducted. This study discusses the use of electronic mail as a vehicle for conducting educational research. It focuses particularly…

This paper examines the mechanics of argumentation, some features of computer conferencing software that might support this teaching and learning method (e.g., strategies for sharing, examining and commenting on various kinds of evidence, threading a conversation, indicating type of message, linking to outside information, highlighting new…

As a compulsory part of the study in Pedagogical Information Science at the University of Bergen and Stord/Haugesund College (Norway) during the spring term of 1999, students participated in a distributed group activity that provided experience on distributed collaboration and use of online groupware systems. The group collaboration process was…

The concept of physical and chemical change is far from being the clearest and most self-explanatory concept in the world. If a number of chemists are asked to define physical and chemical change, there may well appear to be a fair degree of uniformity in their answers, until a few examples are suggested. When chemists are asked to place a variety…

Compares the interactions in two listservs, one dealing with a chronic illness (diabetes), the other with a more acute disease (colon cancer). Analysis of 1000 messages from each list categorized messages by problem orientation and into socioemotional areas having positive and negative reactions and into task areas for asking questions and…

Describes the Keypal Project, a project in which e-mail was introduced in two kindergarten classes with the intent to enrich children's literacy and communication skills and foster long-distance relationships. Found the project had great learning potential and was easily incorporated into constructivist programs which emphasize active learning.…

Discusses barriers to threaded-topic discussions in online teaching. Suggests a better way to enhance communication and promote collaborative learning: a jointly prepared, "shared document" format. Describes the development and use of Forum MATRIX, a software program designed to maximize the potential of the shared document format. (AEF)

Discusses problem solving, problem-based learning, and collaborative learning, and describes a university study that investigated the effects of individual Web-based learning versus computer-mediated collaborative Web-based learning and ability grouping on learner performance in solving ill-defined problems. Considers time on task, participant…

Discussion of computer mediated communication for interactive learning focuses on a study of social science students conducted at Southern Cross University (Australia) that investigated students' perceptions of the importance of online discussion. Topics include social cohesion; social constructivism; benchmarking; student motivation and…