Meaning making is central to the interactions that take place in CSCL settings. The collaborative construction of shared meaning is a complex process that has not previously been analyzed in detail despite the fact that it is often acknowledged as being the distinguishing element in CSCL. Here, a three-minute excerpt from a discussion among three students is considered in some detail. The stude...

We are investigating the nature of knowledge building in virtual communities. In particular, we are exploring the possibility that a small group of students collaborating online on math problems can construct shared group knowledge that exceeds the knowledge of the individual group members. That is, can people working and learning as a community accomplish tasks that none of them would have bee...

Using activity theory as a framework, this article discusses a naturalistic study of two college classrooms in which the instructors often relied on transmission models of communication—models assuming that stable, fixed meanings can be neatly transmitted from person to person. Particularly noteworthy was that these instructors seemed to rely on transmission models despite training in recent th...

Software systems that structure conversation (and vice versa), formalise the roles of interactors, process their interactions, and provide other forms of ‘support’ are the object and subject of design and evaluation in CSCW, and its related fields of research and practice. E-democracy is a relatively recent addition to them, and can be characterised as the use of network technologies to promote...

Several recent research projects in artificial intelligence are devoted to the development of natural, multi-modal user-machine interfaces. Most of the work in this field share, more or less explicitly, the assumption that artificial agents who are competent in multi-modal communication should possess both context awareness and meta-cognitive abilities such as being able to represent and make i...

In current presence or availability systems, the method of presenting a user’s state often supposes an instantaneous notion of that state – for example, a visualization is rendered or an inference is made about the potential actions that might be consistent with a user’s state. Drawing on observational research on the use of existing communication technology, we argue (as have others in the pas...

What is the relationship between politics and disasters and how does this relate to the recent boom in disaster studies? The introduction to this volume argues that the recent interest in disasters is not because there are more disasters, but because of two recent developments within the social sciences: first, a focus on rupture rather than on continuity and second, a focus on materiality. Dis...

This article presents a method for studying influence and power in conversation interaction. The 'speech act method' categorises conversation into actions that influences participants objectives, perceptions and actions. It is argued that influence is a process where an individual changes his or her intentions and actions on the basis of the likely reactions of others. Power is understood as th...

There is, it could be argued, an enormous symbolic capital invested in the belief that it is artistic practice that informs the pedagogy of artists who teach. Despite the apparent tendency for artists to reproduce stylistic character in their students and apprentices, this paper argues that the instructional relations between student and artist teacher are driven by art educational convention r...

Despite much research on teaching, (preservice) teachers in the field still experience a considerable gap between theory and the prescriptions for teaching and their own day-today practice. We conceptualize this gap in terms of the difference between descriptions of practice and practice itself. Descriptions are problematic because they (a) can not include the tacit understanding (background, p...