We reported a study that analyzes collaborative information behavior of small groups in an online math discourse community. Taking group as the unit of analysis, we analyzed the social interactions of participants engaged in collaborative math problem solving and examined how they seek for information in such context. Participants look for information oriented to the procedure, problem, context...

Currently, numerous educators and policymakers are advocating for a move away from “teacher-centered” models of instruction and toward more “learner-centered” and “community-based” models. However, at present the word “community” is at risk of losing its meaning. We have little appreciation and few criteria for distinguishing between a community of learners and a group of students learning coll...

In Gausdal, a mountainous community in southern Norway, a conflict involving dogsledding has dominated local politics during the past two decades. In order to understand local protests against this activity, in this article we apply discourse analysis within the evolving approach of political ecology. In this way, we also aim at contributing to the emerging trend of bringing political ecology “...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW This study considers the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a tool for promoting the full social inclusion of people with a mental or intellectual disability. RECENT FINDINGS The United Nations Convention has ushered in a new era of discourse that moves beyond a consideration of individual impairments, to focus on the social and environme...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a simple means of brain stimulation, possesses a trifecta of appealing features: it is relatively safe, relatively inexpensive and relatively effective. It is also relatively easy to obtain a device and the do-it-yourself (DIY) community has become galvanised by reports that tDCS can be used as an all-purpose cognitive enhancer. We provide practic...

Classroom discussion practices that can lead to reasoned participation by all students are presented and described by the authors. Their research emphasizes the careful orchestration of talk and tasks in academic learning. Parallels are drawn to the philosophical work on deliberative discourse and the fundamental goal of equipping all students to participate in academically productive talk. The...

In this paper I explore the potential for viewing education as an “unrestricted communication community” (Habermas 1990: 88), using categorisations from Habermas of different kinds of action as analytical tools for examining educational practices. For the paper, I pursue two main themes: 1) how the concept of communicative action in relation to the three forms of knowledge-constitutive interest...

Inquiring into the causes behind the spread of secularism in the modern world, this paper proposes that the concept has proliferated owing to its peculiar property as culture: It is simultaneously a piece of culture and also a reflection upon culture. In its latter capacity, it imagines a world in which alternative religious belief systems divide people. It spreads as a piece of culture because...

The symposium entitled Empirical Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation had two goals: (1) to investigate the empirical methods that can be used in the development and evaluation of computational theories of discourse and (2) to develop a set of shared resources for the computational discourse community. The workshop was successful at achieving the first goal because of the large nu...