Supporting Emergence of Threaded Learning Conversations through Augmenting Interactional and Sequential Coherence

In this article, we propose a structure of threaded learning conversations taking place in virtual learning communities. This new structure aims at facilitating the emergence of learning conversations in these learning communities. These threaded conversations take place in a forum-type tool that uses a tree data structure composed of threads to organize group communication. We identify two situations which discourage the emergence of the learning conversations taking place in threaded based tools. We are interested in, namely “interactional incoherence” and “sequential incoherence”. For each of these identified drawbacks, we conceive mechanisms which intend to surmount these incoherencies: first, the localization of topics in a message, based on the “what you answer is what you link” criteria; and second, a visualization that allows merging in a single view the time order and the thread order of the messages. Finally, we present a tool based on these mechanisms and describe some preliminary results of its use.