0000000000204905
AUTHOR
Johanna Pöysä
Communities in Technology-Enhanced Environments for Learning
The contemporary society addresses complex, interrelated, and interactive global situations to be faced by its citizens. Instead of pursuing solitary actions, this post-modern turn requires its actors to develop capacities to resituate their activities in collective unities and to successfully communicate their actions within these multiple local and global communities. Also in education, the concept of community continues to possess a positive image and the optimistic premises of how communication technologies may enable communities to grow have been widely discussed. For example, in higher education, educational practices (e.g. Virtual University) are more often fixed around Web-based col…
A Participant Experience Method for Illustrating Individuals’ Experiences in the Course of an Evolving Virtual Learning Community
Early definitions of virtual learning communities often abstracted participants from their offline environments. However, often students’ virtual and physical environments are not essentially separated. Likewise, scholars should become more sensitive to and aware of their research principles and practices guiding studies in virtual settings and especially, in the intersections of on- and offline contexts. The participant experience method discussed in this paper, grants access also to the events outside the virtual learning context connecting various social settings and simultaneous events. However, the use of participant experience methods requires critical reflection during its various ph…
Scripting Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning
In this chapter, we will present a review of theoretical and empirical analyses of Web-based collaboration processes used during a scripted university course. The results refer to a design-based study that involved first-year teacher-education students (N = 30) studying pedagogy over a period of three months. The intervention involved structuring the subjects’ collaborative actions with three different pedagogical scripts. According to the findings, the scripts guided students’ activities by helping them find resources for knowledge construction and work together through a series of steps. However, there were variations among groups in terms of quality of collaboration, and the students mos…
In search for the conceptual origin of university students' community in a confluence of on- and offline learning environments ethnographies in technology-rich, multi-sited fields of study
Contemporary society requires its citizens to develop capacities to resituate their activities in collective unities and to successfully communicate their actions within these multiple local and global communities. Also in higher education, educational practices are increasingly fixed around web-based, collaborative learning environments, designed for the values of community and collective learning. The publication presents a study that explored learning communities in technology-rich higher education milieus. The aim was to search for the conceptual origin of university students’ community and its reference point in this context. In this work, methodological tools to study, to analyse, and…