A number of software environments have been developed as media to support collaborative knowledge building, typically featuring a Web-based threaded discussion facility. We have recently developed such a system, known as WEBGUIDE. The distinctive feature of this system is support for structuring collaboration and knowledge construction with personal, group and comparison perspectives. While pil...

BBS(Bulletin Board Systems) is one of the most common places for threaded discussion. It becomes more and more popular among web users, especially in China. Everyday a huge amount of new discussions are generated on BBS. It is too difficult to find hot topics. To solve this issue, we propose a novel approach to detect hot topics on BBS for any period of time. Our solution consists of three step...

Gordon Pask’s conversation theory stands as a major contribution to cybernetics, education and epistemology. Ranulph Glanville was Pask’s student. He made himself familiar with conversation theory and promoted it in his lecture and writings throughout his career. In doing so, he made significant contributions. I summarise some of these here. To set the scene, I briefly outline some of the main ...

This paper discusses issues, possibilities and existing approaches for fitting an exception handling mechanism (EHM) in CSP-based process-oriented software architectures. After giving a survey on properties desired for a concurrent EHM, specific problems and a few principal ideas for including exception handling facilities in CSP-designs are discussed. As one of the CSP-based frameworks for con...

An experimental study of asynchronously communicating dyads tested the claim that conceptual representations could more effectively support collaborative knowledge construction in online learning than threaded discussions. Results showed that users of conceptual representations created more hypotheses earlier in the experimental sessions and elaborated on hypotheses more than users of threaded ...

Gordon Pask developed not only a Conversation Theory, but also a (less well-known) Interaction of Actors Theory, partly in response to demands during the time he worked in Amsterdam. The paper aims to clarify how this Theory intended to minimise the effcts of use on scientific results, while maximimising the help such results to improve on actions. This would facilitate empirical study of what ...

The present study is aimed at investigating the relationship among Iranian EFL teachers’ reflective teaching, reflective thinking and classroom management ability. To this purpose, 102 male and female EFL teachers, aged between 25 and 40, with different academic background who were teaching at different levels, were chosen to fill in three questionnaires on reflective thinking, reflective teach...

this study examined the effects of cooperative learning techniques (clt) on vocabulary achievement of reflective/impulsive iranian efl learners. from among 130 students at fajr institute in dehdasht, kohkiloyeh and boyer ahmad province, iran, 90 participants were selected based on their performance on the oxford placement test (opt). the participants were then divided into two experimental grou...

The present research aimed at investigating the interaction of the classroom talk to have a better understanding of the teachers’ practice teaching which can pave the way for reflection on teaching. The study benefitted from conversation analytic perspective to qualitatively and interpretively examine the classroom discourse of the teacher-learner interaction. The classroom talk was analyzed th...

The present study aimed to investigate the interaction among grade dropping and reflective thinking abilities of the participants and to also check if action research enhances learners’ reflective thinking. A cyclic action research was run for 8 sessions. Kember et al.’s (2010) reflective thinking questionnaire and three in-term quizzes were administered. Students also made questions based on t...