Educating Through Democracy: A Critical Analysis of Classroom Discourse

In this dissertation, the researcher examined teachers’ and students’ discourses through a social constructionist framing of democratic education to understand how they disrupted or maintained traditional schooling discourses. Data were generated during four consecutive days of video and audio recording of teachers’ and students’ discourses. Other data sources included open-ended interviews; observations; field notes; methodological journal; analytic memos; and the school’s website. Two cycles of coding were employed to identify the teachers’ and students’ discursive enactments. The researcher then utilized a process of micro-ethnographic Interactional Sociolinguistic Transcription as well as Gee’s (2014) processes of micro-ethnographic and macro-ethnographic critical discourse analyses to understand how the teachers’ and students’ discourses disrupted or maintained traditional schooling discourses. Findings demonstrate that teachers and students enacted discourses that disrupted and maintained traditional schooling discourses, sometimes simultaneously. Additionally, findings indicate that it is necessary to employ a social constructionist framing when studying democratic education in order to understand how democracy is nurtured within discourse. KEYWORDS: democratic education, social constructionism, critical discourse analysis, discourse, democrac

Changing communication on researchgate through interface updates

Informal scholarly communication across the Web is a growing component of the scholarly communication infrastructure. This study describes the effects of three different interfaces on these informal channels. Interface design has a widely studied effect on user behavior, and new users often encounter barriers during accessing social media tools. Using a mixed methods approach, we collected and grouped 413 posts across three distinct interfaces of ResearchGate's communication platform. Our results show that scholars were more polite in the initial group discussion interface but that user interface design did not change the core communication patterns of sharing information and opinions among scholars. The site also transitioned from one-to-many discussions to one-to-one posts, but new users were generally welcomed to the scholarly communications

IDENTIFYING EFFECTIVENESS OF ONLINE GROUP STUDY ON MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM SOLVING ATTITUDE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Designing a group study enables students to develop critical thinking, effective team work; appreciation and respect for other views, techniques and problem-solving methods by promoting active learning environment. The purpose of this quantitative study examined the effects of online collaboration on the pre-service teachers’ mathematical problem solving attitude. Specifically, the study examined the effects of group working to the mathematical word problem solving tasks alone. Forty-two pre-service teachers enrolled in the study which were divided into three groups: Synchronous online (n=12), face-to-face (n=15) and individual (n=15). Students in each group were required to solve four ill-structured problems under problem solving sessions over a six-week period. It is used a quantitative analysis of data. To measure the change in problem solving attitude, a pre and post-test problem solving attitude questionnaire administered to measure attitude change. The results indicate that, whether synchronous online or face-to-face group based problem solving processes resulted with more positive attitude than individual study. It is also revealed that students' problem solving attitudes were increased in all groups, however, F2F group students' showed positive higher difference than those SO and IND students.  Article visualizations

E-forum moderation as an element of blended learning courses for university students : a research - based study

E-forum is widely recognized to be an effective method of students' learning. Research on processes and phenomena in synchronous (SOD) and asynchronous (AOD) discussion at e-forum date back to the first years of the new Millennium and explore both the role and tasks of the moderator as well as complex preconditions of a productive and satisfying students' participation. The present article focusses on moderation of e-forum discussion and in particular, on two crucial and challenging moments in e-forum moderation: opening and closing. The co-authors of this paper have constructed their perspective on e-forum moderation upon analysis of the role of discussion in the teaching/learning process in face to face, e-learning, and b-learning settings. The final remarks and postulates follow conclusions from the original research study

On Line Instruction: An Opportunity To Re-Examine And Re-Invent Pedagogy

Author recounts ten discoveries she made about on-line instruction that were beyond her field of vision when she was still viewing it though the lens of traditional classroom instruction. The discoveries include what she learned by reviewing the research in effective course design and a discourse analysis she conducted of the number and types of ideas exchanged during two asynchronous discussions

Task, Team and Time to structure online collaboration in learning environments

The debate on whether and how to structure collaboration in online learning environments is quite active. In this paper the authors identify Task, Team and Time as the main components of an online collaborative activity, through which the overall structure of the activity can be determined to scaffold learners\u27 interactions. Based on five examples of real-life online learning activities featuring different degrees of structure as to Task, Team and Time, the authors reflect on the extent to which the way these three dimensions are structured may affect the overall learning process. Method of the study is interaction analysis of the students messages, exchanged in asynchronous mode during the activity. The analysis was carried out according to a quantitative and qualitative model that distinguishes among the participative, social, cognitive and teaching dimensions. The results of the study seem to support the hypothesis that the three Ts well represent the structure of CSCL activities and that, in many cases, it is the lack of structure in one or more of them that is associated to a higher frequency of some indicators, as if the missing guidance causes an enhanced effort on the side of the learners to compensate the deficit

Online interaction in social learning environment towards critical thinking skill: A framework

Interaction is one of the crucial processes in online learning, which is a process derived from a common encouragement among people action that they able to utilize, store, share and construct knowledge. It is believed that the interaction among students is able to train the students to involve in active learning and enhance critical thinking skill. Recently, critical thinking is recognized as one of the 21st-century skills that students must have to do well in the community. The engagement of the students in a learning environment that supports higher-order thinking activity is the most effective approach to guide the students in developing critical thinking skills. Nevertheless, without the assistance of technology, it may be nearly impossible to ensure that all students have access to learning environments that support and develop these skills. The way students study, interact and think has been shifted due to the increasing use of technologies in learning institutions, particularly during online learning. The online platform is better when there are students interact with each other in form of social learning. Nonetheless, limited research is available on how online interaction in the social learning environment can promote students’ critical thinking skill. This study utilized a theory-building method to design the framework. The purpose of the framework of this study is to assist other practitioners and researchers in applying the elements of online interaction in a social learning environment to foster students’ critical thinking skill.Peer Reviewe

Use of visual analysis to investigate networked learning in online forums

Asynchronous online forums such as FirstClass are frequently used in many educational settings to link networks of learners. They offer opportunities for knowledge-building dialogue and for the exchange of learning resources, but many students struggle to make effective use of them. Researchers have therefore been concerned to investigate how learners successfully build knowledge together in online forums and which skills and literacies are likely to help users to learn in these environments. To date, much of this research has focused on the textual elements of online forum dialogue. This paper acknowledges the importance of studying these textual elements, but presents visual analysis as a complementary tool that can significantly extend understanding of activity in these forums. Asynchronous dialogue, like written text, is typically both verbal and visual, with much of its meaning carried by a range of visual features, including layout and typographical elements. These aspects of forum data require analysis of the composition of the dialogue alongside its content. In the case of such composite texts, with meanings realised through different semiotic codes, visual and verbal elements interact and should be analysed as an integrated whole. This semiotic approach draws attention to the syntax of images as a source of meaning and to the structuring principles that enable viewers to make sense of the layout of text and images. These principles include salience, frames, vectors and reading paths. This paper demonstrates ways in which analysis that makes use of these structuring principles can increase understanding of online exchanges between learners. It takes as an exemplar a series of forum postings that were shared in the formal setting of an online course at the UK’s Open University. It shows that the construction of knowledge in an online forum is heavily reliant on visual elements of the online interaction, and that a focus on words alone does not make it clear either how this construction takes place or why it fails to take place on some occasions. Visual analysis shows that groups of learners use affordances of forum software to increase the salience of some elements of the dialogue and to increase the coherence of their discussion

Power and the social construction of service users and clinical psychologists

Power issues in the relationship between service users and clinical psychologists have received little attention from a postmodern perspective. The recovery approach and the scientist-practitioner model as recommended in best practice guidelines creates an argument for investigating power dynamics in academic and practical dissemination. This study aimed to investigate the social construction of service users and clinical psychologists in articles. Twelve articles and opinion pieces written by clinical psychologists and service users were sampled from publications of the Clinical Psychology Forum. A Foucauldian Discourse Analytic method was used to identify dominant discourses and counter-discourses. The discourses were linked to the power dynamics in play between relevant institutions. The analysis identified an economic discourse, a technical-rational discourse and an expert discourse as constructing service users and clinical psychologists. Clinical psychologists were found to have more discourse availability than service users, and in a position to make choices, whereas service users were found to have availability to a limited number of discourses with fewer options of subjectivity. A need for clinical psychologists to make conscious choices in practice was implied