Cindy Xin

Pedagogy in Cyberspace: The Dynamics of Online Discourse

This article elaborates a model for understanding pedagogy in online educational forums. The model identifies four key components. Intellectual engagement describes the foreground cognitive processes of collaborative learning. Communication processes operating in the background accumulate an ever richer store of shared understandings that enable the forward movement of the conversation. The collaborative process requires a moderator to coordinate communication and learning in a group. The moderator in online education is usually a teacher, who shares knowledge in the process of leading discussion. Finally, a successful discussion generates intrinsic motivations to participate, which keep the discussion going. This framework is designed to bring out the complexity of online discussion and to provide a basis for advising teachers, and evaluating applications and software.

Designing for pedagogical effectiveness: the TextWeaver/sup TM/

The online discussion forum is the main mode of interaction for Web-based learning. Existing online instructional management systems contain primitive discussion tools that do little to facilitate online interaction and collaborative discourse. This paper proposes the design of a new type of software - the TextWeaver/sup TM/ - to meet these needs. In particular, we illustrate improved design in four areas: reading and composing, message keywording and weaving, material storing and reusing, and working offline. The paper starts with an overview of existing network-based educational systems and discusses software design considerations for networked computers and related pedagogical principles. This is followed by a description of the proposed design of the TextWeaver/sup TM/ and a discussion of its pedagogical implications. We conclude with a discussion of evaluation strategies for the software, future directions for research, and a summary of our conclusions.