A Case Study on Exploring Students’ Intellectual Interactions in A Network-enhanced Classroom Setting1

It is widely recognized that the Internet offers tremendous potential for education at all levels. This article describes a case study examining how an Internet communication program, EdPsy Web, which was used to support a pre-service teacher training course changed the quality of social and intellectual interactions relative to those found in a traditional classroom setting. Using a post-course survey, on-line data and electronic message analysis, we sought to answer the following questions: (a) Did a network-enhanced classroom setting motivate students to interact and share knowledge? and (b) Did distinctive intellectual interactions occur in network-enhanced classroom settings? The survey showed that students saw the value of and demonstrated positive attitudes toward network learning after using EdPsy Web to facilitate discourses. When assignments were delivered in an electronic form, students were motivated to see and compare what other students had accomplished, and thus were more aware of what they had achieved. The time and place-independent nature of this network learning environment provided opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing among users. The analysis of electronic discourse explicitly demonstrated the multi-threaded nature of electronic message interactions. In general, the network-enhanced classroom setting offered an alternative pattern of interaction that differed from the traditional face-to-face setting in some ways, but not all.