This article discusses how an instruction librarian created an online learning community of adult learners in a hybrid, credit-bearing information literacy course. The Blackboard course management system was utilized for weekly course discussion on ethical issues involving the use of information to promote student engagement in the critical…

Sex offenders have used the Internet to identify and contact minors for sexual exploitation (Armagh, 1998; Hernandez, 2000; Lamb, 1998; Lanning, 1998). Yet little is known about how these individuals select their online victims. In order to gain a better understanding of this behavior, the online activity of 31 men who perpetrated or attempted to…

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is currently used in language teaching as a bridge for the development of written and spoken skills [Kern, R., 1995. "Restructuring classroom interaction with networked computers: effects on quantity and characteristics of language production." "The Modern Language Journal" 79, 457-476]. Within CMC…

The contributors to this article reflect on the process and value of participating together in a monthly reflective supervision group for supervisors in a child abuse prevention program. Some of them joined the group with considerable interest in and experience with reflective supervision. For others this was an entirely new experience that they…

The use of discourse in the mathematics classroom can be difficult to implement and manage. The same students participate in every discussion while others contribute only when called on, and even then their contributions are sparse. Some students make comments that relate to procedure but never reach the deeper-level mathematical concepts. This…

Teachers know from their training and experience that questioning plays an important role in today's instruction. Modern lessons are fast-paced and interactive, with teachers asking a lot of questions. Because this instructional strategy dominates class time and because students are active during the lesson, there are more chances for management…

Communication and discussion are keys to student learning and understanding in online environments. With more teachers and K-12 school systems adopting course management tools such as Blackboard and SharePoint, online discussion has become another means of engaging students in curriculum-based learning. Online discussions provide opportunities for…

Despite emphasis and progress in developing collaborative inquiry in computer-supported collaborative learning research, little attention has been given to examining how collective learning can be assessed in computer-supported collaborative learning classrooms, and how students can have agency in assessing their own collaborative process. We…

Children benefit in many ways from actively engaging in high quality children's literature, and picture books provide a natural avenue to motivate and encourage students' writing. Shared book experiences in small or large group settings can lead to meaningful writing discussions and applications. Picture books serve as exemplars of the six…

How do teachers in diverse classrooms enact a transactional mode of literary response in their orchestration of classroom conversations about literature? This paper proposes that a theory of expressive language is central to answering this question and that the discourse genre of oral narratives may hold critical importance in accomplishing this…

Based on the results of a qualitative study that examined the role of talk during literacy events in a preschool classroom, this article describes ongoing talk among 4-year old children during three reading activities: reading informational text; narrating a story; and browsing over photos. The reading activities in which preschool children were…

This paper explores the important relationship between dialogue and cognitive and metacognitive development in young children. The characteristics of dialogue are identified and a case is presented for involving young children in talking to think through philosophical discussion. The paper provides a theoretical context for kinds of metacognitive…

Can short, ungraded, free-writing assignments promote learning of course material? We randomly assigned introductory psychology recitation sections (N = 978 students) to writing or thinking conditions. For all sections, teaching assistants presented students with a discussion topic based in current coursework. Students either wrote or thought…

A facilitator or moderator is often responsible for supporting processes and their progress in learning communities. In this article we present an approach for supporting moderators of asynchronous processes in learning communities. This approach follows the socio-technical perspective: it includes a theory-based development of moderator tasks and…

In this article, we explore how members of a teacher conversation group, focused on primary students' learning, circulated and instantiated a cultural model of what teaching for literacy meant and how young children learned. We show how, over time, particular discourses around literacy as a quantifiable and measurable skill populated teachers',…