The role of the potential of meaning in asynchronous dialogues in a collective process of collaboration

This study’s aim is to describe and explore how 40 teacher students, engaged in courses in web-based learning environments, successively develop a collective competence to collaborate during two 15-credit courses in a period of 40 weeks. The collective competence of collaboration is here defined as the level of learning ability, a group of students express, when using dialogues as a tool for their own and other’s learning in a web-based learning environment. The students’ contributions to the course assignments, the group responses and the collaborative discussions and dialogues were analysed and interpreted based on Bakhtin’s (1986, 2004) and Rommetveit’s (2003) theories on dialogic interactions and meaning potentials. The results describes three levels of thematic pattern in the dialogues as a competence to collaborate within the group.