An emerging trend toward computer-mediated collaborative learning environments promotes lively exchanges between learners in order to facilitate learning. Discourse can play an important role in enhancing epistemology, pedagogy, and assessments in these environments. In this paper, we highlight some of our recent work showing the advantages using theoretically grounded automated linguistics tools to identify pedagogically valuable discourse features that can be applied in collaborative learning, intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), computer-mediated collaborative learning (CMCL), and MOOC environments.