Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of informal (everyday) knowledge on scientific foundations, along the lines indi-
cated by Vygotsky (1987). Finally, anxieties about change were a potential barrier to
change. Anxieties arose because changes in conceptual knowledge entailed changes
in how teachers understood their professional roles. The use of internet-mediated
social networks afforded teachers' opportunities to draw support from professional
peers.
Chapter “Knowledge Building/Knowledge Forum: The formation of Classroom
Discourse” is first introduced by looking at a typical classroom discourse. The
authors examine the structure of a discourse by referring to the work of Sinclair and
Coulthard (1975), Mehan (1979), and Cazden (2001). They point out that typical
face-to-face classroom discourse has three turns and is composed of the following
moves: teacher initiation (e.g., ask a question) (I), student response (R) and teacher
feedback/comment (F), or evaluation (E) of the student's response (IRF/IRE). The
study was done using the grids developed by Hmelo-Silver and Barrows (2008)
and a classification system developed by Hakkarainen (2003). The results illus-
trated a level of explanation in online student discourse that is different from the
IRE classroom discourse structure (teacher-initiated question-student response-
teacher evaluation) from the work of Cazden (2001) and with the IRF structure
(initiation-response-feedback) of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) and Wells (1993).
Chapter 25 examines the question of how digital video tools in the classroom can
support meaningful collaboration and critical advanced thinking of students. The
authors introduce the chapter by looking at the work of Cassidy, Stanley, and Bartlett
(2006) and also Eckrich, Widule, Shrader, and Maver (1994) to point out how digital
video technology is used for professional video analyses. The authors argue that
when students design a video-based presentation, they go through an intensive cog-
nitive elaboration and critical reflections on the video content. The chapter tries
to answer the following questions: “How do students approach video-based design
tasks in a real, 'noisy' classroom setting? How do the technical properties of digital
video tools influence collaboration?” Moreover, the authors point out that contem-
porary literacy concept cannot be limited to individual skills of reading and writing
static texts, tables, and graphs but must now be extended toward complex visual
media (e.g., Stahl, Zahn, & Finke, 2006). The chapter concludes that “a substantial
knowledge and (visual) literacy skills acquisition takes place during a collaborative
visual design task, even when students spend only a short period of time with the
video material” and also “digital video technologies can act as powerful cognitive
tools supporting the learning processes during collaborative visual design tasks.”
In Chapter 26, the authors refer to Brophy and Good (1986), Tomlinson (1999),
DiGiano and Atton (2002), Fischer, Wecker, Schrader, Gerjets, and Hesse (2005),
Gravier Fayolle, Noyel, Leleve, and Benmohamed (2006), Dillenbourg and Fischer
(2007), and von Inqvald, (2009) to illustrate how the word “orchestration” was used
to refer to “the design and real-time management of multiple classroom activities,
multiple learning processes and multiple teaching actions.” The authors look at the
criteria that we use to criticize “teaching methods” and “learning environments” as
researchers and teachers. The chapter argues that “educational research requires that
