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 th...

From a sociocultural constructivist perspective of learning, dialogic interactions between students and tutors support meaning negotiation that leads to knowledge construction. In online educational contexts, interaction between learning parties is largely facilitated by CMC technologies. Most research has focused on asynchronous CMC modes which are held to offer learners an ever-present window...

Social construction of understanding has long been a significant underlying principle of learning and teaching, and while there are many models for the design of online activities to promote this, there are considerably fewer models for the facilitation of such dialogue. This paper examines some of these facilitation models from the point of view of a university tutor seeking to encourage socia...

Thanks to technology-pervaded learning environments, digital natives can experiment new engaging ways of learning together at school. In particular, large displays with multi-touch technology hold new opportunities for the learning process, through the dialogic interaction between students and the simultaneous physical interaction with the screen. Our research suggests the use of a context-awar...

This special issue discusses various pedagogical innovations and myriad of significant findings. This commentary is not a synthesis of these contributions, but a summary of my own reflections on selected aspects of the nine papers comprising the special issue. Four themes subsume these reflections: (1) Gestural Communication (Alibali, Nathan, Church, Wolfgram, Kim and Knuth 2013); (2) Developme...

This paper reports on a study designed to examine the dialogic processes teachers used to sustain focused discussions, using questioning techniques and Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs). IWBs and their related technologies such as plasma touch screens and projected tablets have passed through several phases of implementation as classroom objects, from initial adoption by a few enthusiasts, through...