This paper aims to identify and to understand the role of the logical, the affective and the ethical dimensions of knowledge in the online interactions of post-secondary teachers and students. By understanding how these dimensions are interwoven, I intend to demonstrate that the instructor?s course design and teaching strategies must take them…

The development of technologies enables us to create online learning environments. As online learning is expanding its role in higher education, it becomes one of fundamental issues how to create online learning environments to facilitate online interaction. One of the methods is using a discussion board where learners can interact with other…

This paper considers student use of a web-based discussion forum in a second year, non-major Biology course. The authors discuss how meaningful participation in the forum is a form of public writing and may be an indicator of overall student success in the course. The authors also discuss how this success in the course is not tied to the students?…

This paper considers four aspects of online communities. Design, mechanisms, architecture, and the constructed knowledge. We hypothesize that different designs of communities drive different mechanisms, which give rise to different architectures, which in turn result in different levels of collaborative knowledge construction. To test this chain…

The terms "cooperative" and "collaborative" are sometimes used interchangeably in reference to group learning activities in classrooms and in online settings. However, they can be viewed as differing in terms of characteristics such as pre-structure, task structure, and content structure (Strijbos & Martens, 2001; Panitz, 1996). This study…

Designers who are charged with creating online environments that support students' problem-solving efforts and instructors who are searching for instructional strategies to support students' asynchronous problem-solving efforts will find this paper useful. The paper describes a systematic approach for using computer-mediated bulletin boards to…

For the twenty-seventh year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the National AECT Convention in Chicago, Illinois. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…

For the twenty-sixth year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the National AECT Convention in Anaheim, CA. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two volumes.…

For the twenty-fifth year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the National AECT Convention in Dallas, TX. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two volumes.…