Cracking the code: learning to collaborate and collaborating to learn in a networked environment

ABSTRACT This paper is based on the central idea that networked teaching may best be improved by those engaged in it. Systematic enquiry into educational interactions can yield understandings and insights about one of the fundamental relationships of all educational endeavours: between teaching and learning. The paper explores this relationship through analyses of teaching and learning in a networked collaborative learning environment using two new content analysis schemas. The first of these probes the social co-construction of knowledge in a collaborative online event by analysing the social, cognitive and metacognitive contributions to an online learning event. In the second schema the presence of teacher processes is investigated. Computer assisted qualitative data analysis is used for this. In conclusion, consideration is given to the prospects for this type of approach as a means of enriching understandings of the complexity of the relationship between teaching and learning in networked collaborative learning environments.