This paper presents two studies that examine emergent leadership in children's collaborative learning groups. Building on research that finds that leadership moves are distributed among group members during learning activities, we examined whether there were patterns in the distribution of moves, resulting in different types of emergent…

Collaborative learners are often meant to be guided by collaboration scripts to identify, discuss, and resolve differences of opinion and knowledge. How learners engage in and resolve conflict, however, may be highly dependent on learners' cultural background. In this article, we examine the extent to which a peer-critique collaboration…

The benefits of collaborative learning are well documented. However, most of the research has been done with children beyond the ages of early childhood. This could be due to the common and erroneous belief that young children have not developed the capacity to work collaboratively toward a given aim. In this paper we show how small group…

Knowledge sharing and transfer are essential for learning in groups, especially when group members have different disciplinary expertise and collaborate online. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments have been designed to facilitate transactive knowledge sharing and transfer in collaborative problem-solving settings. This…

This article reports a theory-driven experimental study that evaluates the effects of an annotation functionality on online social interaction and individual learning outcomes. The central hypothesis of this study is that directly addressing a part of a text by annotating it and then connecting each annotation with its related discussion can…

This study explored how young children interact with their peers in the computer area of a public kindergarten classroom. Children's social interaction, as defined in this study, is the action of giving and taking information that results in children's knowledge construction and cognitive development that can be accomplished through peer-to-peer…

Research related to online discussions frequently faces the problem of analyzing huge corpora. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies may allow automating this analysis. However, the state-of-the-art in machine learning and text mining approaches yields models that do not transfer well between corpora related to different topics. Also,…

Computer-supported collaborative learning has an unexploited potential of becoming an effective learning method for pupils with intellectual disabilities. This paper aims at showing how some specific requirements of this target group may be met by structuring a learning situation with the help of "floor control," which restricts the opportunities…

Developing shared understanding is essential to productive collaboration where a product is jointly constructed. This is especially true when the different collaborators' contributions need to build coherently on one another, as, for example, when making a story together. This study investigated whether encouraging children to engage in discussion…

The purpose of this paper is to show how a large group of students can work collaboratively in a synchronous way within the classroom using the cheapest possible technological support. Making use of the features of Single Display Groupware and of Multiple Mice we propose a computer-supported collaborative learning approach for big groups within…

Interactive tabletops are gaining increased attention from CSCL researchers. This paper analyses the relation between this technology and teaching and learning processes. At a global level, one could argue that tabletops convey a socio-constructivist flavor: they support small teams that solve problems by exploring multiple solutions. The…

This article reviews the research and evidence about multi-touch tables to provide an analysis of their key design features and capabilities and how these might relate to their use in educational settings to support collaborative learning. A typology of design features is proposed as a synthesis of the hardware and physical characteristics of the…

Social network sites such as Facebook are often conceived of as purely social spaces; however, as these sites have evolved, so have the ways in which students are using them. In this study, we examine how undergraduate students use the social network site Facebook to engage in classroom-related collaborative activities (e.g., arranging study…

Why has technology become prevalent in science education without fundamentally improving test scores or student attitudes? We claim that the core of the problem is "how" technology is being used. Technologies such as simulations are currently not used to their full potential. For instance, physiology simulations often follow textbooks by…

We implemented a five-week family program called "Family Quest" where parents and children ages 9 to 13 played Quest Atlantis, a multiuser 3D educational computer game, at a local after-school club for 90-minute sessions. We used activity theory as a conceptual and an analytical framework to study the nature of intergenerational play, the…