Argues that a major difficulty in formalizing linguistic dialogue interaction is the uncertainty arising from various factors. Advances proposals for capturing at least some of those factors in logical representations: topic/subtopic arrangement; semantic allocation; participants' competence; discourse goals; semantic, psychological, and pragmatic…

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…

Evaluates a training Web site for professional development of health and safety enforcement officers in the United Kingdom and reviews the use of knowledge elicitation in work-based training in accident investigations. Results showed that the training was realistic and that the imbedded discussion facility had the potential to improve enforcement…

This article describes a system that autonomously mediates threaded discussions in distance learning environments. The objective is to produce large-scale threaded discussions among an arbitrary number of participants with no human mediation effort.

This experiment examined the impact of selective postevent discussion of high- and low-elaborative styles on 5- and 6-year-olds' (N = 47) memory for discussed and nondiscussed aspects of a staged event ("Visiting the Pirate"). The event contained both logically and arbitrarily connected scenes. Discussion was spaced over 3 days, and memory was…

This article comments on Thomas Fagan's historical account of the 1954 Thayer Conference and offers my personal views on its importance. Many improvements to the infrastructure of school psychology in addition to its growth, are attributable to the program of goals established at the conference, as well as the efforts of passionate and dedicated…

This discussion paper focuses on the problem of how to approach teaching abstract concepts to business and management students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Students are faced with the problem of how to identify and assess the rigour of what they read, how to generalise from the results of their research and how to judge the extent…

This article considers the complex process of having students cross the boundaries of race, class, and culture in the Open Choice program, a remedy designed to reduce the racial, social, and economic isolation of Connecticut school children in the wake of the ruling in the Sheff v. O'Neill (1996) desegregation case. Using transcripts from three…

Though I encourage student expression in lecture, I have found it difficult to achieve broad student-faculty interaction, and difficult for many students to connect Environmental Biology's "global content" with day to day life. A solution to each of these problems is presented in William Fawcett Hill's Learning Through Discussion. This structured…

This article is a description of the artist Claude Monet. The article describes the life and art of Claude Monet, focusing in on his work, Rocks at Bell-Isle, Port-Domois. A brief discussion of the significant elements of the painting is provided. The article also includes a list of discussion questions and suggested classroom activities.

The exercise that this author calls "TRAFFIC" encourages student-centered classroom discussions that aid students in better understanding the reflective, affective, and effective components of oral communication practice. Entering a dialogue is akin to being in traffic, and traffic is a powerful metaphor to use when talking with students about…

Excerpts from current research with people who have autism using online discussion groups are provided. Two major themes emerged that focus on "expert" knowledge of autism and identity. In contrast to the image of people with autism being unable to speak for themselves, our research on chat rooms has demonstrated that these individuals are finding…

The aim of this article is to move beyond issues of representation and to address how museum meanings are made on the ground in ongoing encounters between displays and the ideational worlds their audiences bring with them into the museum space. In particular, the author explores how contrasting expectations about exhibits can serve as an…

A three year longitudinal intervention study is presented where two conditions of reading instruction are compared. In a base condition six teachers--four in the experimental groups and two in the control groups--and their students in grade 4-6 discussed expository texts during a regular lesson. The discussions, which took place in small groups,…

Based on literature and research on discussion and on educational techniques to improve discussion moderators behaviors, a training program was developed for pre- and in-service teacher educators, business and industry executives and university professors (23 to 28 hours, three and a half days). This program was tested for its effectiveness with…