Numerous studies have affirmed the value of asynchronous online communication as a learning resource. Several investigations, however, have indicated that discussions in asynchronous environments are often neither interactive nor coherent. The research reported sought to develop an enhanced understanding of interactional coherence, argumentation,…

The innovation space has become more complex and knowledge-intensive. As a result, it is increasingly important to see innovations as knowledge that is embodied in learning and technical and organisational knowledge bases. However, in processes such as innovation development, individuals make sense of it and utilise existing knowledge differently…

The poster child for the Web 2.0 movement, the wiki, demonstrates the spirit of open content more clearly than any other application. Wikipedia, the most famous wiki and the world's largest encyclopedia, defines a wiki as a Web site that "allows visitors to add, remove, edit, and change content." Even though it is a controversial information…

Argues for "post-structural Marxism" as the pedagogical practice of reading and rereading Marx in a critical manner. Briefly discusses the concept of the social in the post-modern condition before reviewing relations between post-structuralism and Marxism. Provides an account of Deleuze's Marxism, using it to analyze education as a form…

Structural aspects that relate the trivial machine, nontrivial machine, and the actor system are discussed. The term rationalism is discussed in terms of discourses that include or exclude those who participate in the debate. Subsequently, the author elaborates on the notion of reality and the meaning of the real world in relation to gaming,…

Examines how a domain ontology can be reused by different knowledge representation systems. Describes a meta-language which allows a declarative description of any model based on frames, objects, relations, or description logics. Discusses the meta-relation concept which, associated to a definition, represents the signification of the construct…

This article examines concepts and propositions from a theoretical perspective, and establishes the need for and develops an extension to Concept Maps (CMaps), called Cyclic Concept Maps (Cyclic CMaps). Cyclic CMaps are considered to be an appropriate tool for representing knowledge of functional or dynamical relationships between concepts. CMaps,…

This study examined the representation of knowledge in text writing in 20 ten-year-old children and 20 adults in the Netherlands. The research analyzed the use of clause linking devices to compose larger text units. Special attention was given to the use of causal relational markers and the extent to which causal relations within the texts matched…

Provides author comments in response to the papers of Professors Lederman and Ohlsson in "Science and Education," Vol. 4, No. 4, 1995. These papers were in response to the paper "On the Nature of Scientific Thought" ("Science and Education," Vol. 4, No. 1). Includes 19 references. (DDR)

Discusses a concern with using online discussion for learning. Argues that there is lack of technological support for the development of personalized knowledge representation for most online discussion forums and discusses how internalization of collective knowledge can be facilitated through the notion of knowledge objects, while externalization…

People use external knowledge representations (EKRs) to identify, depict, transform, store, share, and archive information. Learning how to work with EKRs is central to becoming proficient in virtually every discipline. As such, EKRs play central roles in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Five key roles of EKRs in educational assessment are…

Research suggests that while information about design is a central feature of older children's artifact representations it may be less important in the artifact representations of younger children. Three experiments explore the pattern of responses that 5- and 7-year-old children generate when asked to produce multiple uses for familiar…

Using a symbolic object such as a model as a source of information about something else requires some appreciation of the relation between the symbol and what it represents. Representational insight has been proposed as essential to success in a symbolic retrieval task in which children must use information from a hiding event in a scale model to…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of aging on the storage of visual and spatial working memory according to Logie's model of working memory (1995). In a first experiment young, elderly, and very old subjects carried out two tasks usually used to measure visual span (Visual Patterns Test) and spatial span (Corsi Block Tapping test).…

Semantic and orthographic learning of new words was investigated with the help of the picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this version of the Stroop task, picture naming is delayed by the simultaneous presentation of a semantically related as opposed to an unrelated distractor word (a specific PWI effect), as well as by an unrelated word…