A number of software environments have been developed as media to support collaborative knowledge building, typically featuring a Web-based threaded discussion facility. We have recently developed such a system, known as WEBGUIDE. The distinctive feature of this system is support for structuring collaboration and knowledge construction with personal, group and comparison perspectives. While pil...

Gordon Pask’s conversation theory stands as a major contribution to cybernetics, education and epistemology. Ranulph Glanville was Pask’s student. He made himself familiar with conversation theory and promoted it in his lecture and writings throughout his career. In doing so, he made significant contributions. I summarise some of these here. To set the scene, I briefly outline some of the main ...

This paper discusses issues, possibilities and existing approaches for fitting an exception handling mechanism (EHM) in CSP-based process-oriented software architectures. After giving a survey on properties desired for a concurrent EHM, specific problems and a few principal ideas for including exception handling facilities in CSP-designs are discussed. As one of the CSP-based frameworks for con...

An experimental study of asynchronously communicating dyads tested the claim that conceptual representations could more effectively support collaborative knowledge construction in online learning than threaded discussions. Results showed that users of conceptual representations created more hypotheses earlier in the experimental sessions and elaborated on hypotheses more than users of threaded ...

This paper investigates learner-initiated responses to English language teachers’ referential questions and learner initiatives after teachers’ feedback moves in meaning-focused question-answer sequences to analyze how interactional practices of language teachers, their initiation and feedback moves, facilitate learner initiatives. Classroom discourse research has largely neglected learner init...

In this paper, we propose a partial framework for annotating conversation with discourse and interaction information. We focus discourse coherence, reported speech and humor that are not included in most of existing dialogue annotation frameworks. These phenomena are ubiquitous in our conversational but their analysis seems necessary for all kind of communicative situations, including task-orie...

This paper deals with the semantics of taste judgements and the updates they bring about in the dialogue context. Unlike most approaches in formal semantics, we build on empirical work in Conversation Analysis to outline the rudiments of a formal theory that is in line with how taste judgements are used in actual conversation. We propose a model that treats predicates of personal taste such as ...

Analyzing complex online relationships is a difficult job, but new information visualization tools are enabling a wider range of users to make actionable insights from the growing volume of online data. This paper describes the challenges and methods for conducting analyses of threaded conversations such as found in enterprise message boards, email lists, and forums. After defining threaded con...

Despite the fact that there are a wide range of strategies used to foster interactions in EFL conversation classrooms, many novice teachers are not aware of them. In view of this problem, the current study aimed to identify such strategies commonly used by EFL teachers in conversation classrooms. To this end, fifty sessions of college level conversation classrooms were observed andtheir teacher...

The present research aimed at investigating the interaction of the classroom talk to have a better understanding of the teachers’ practice teaching which can pave the way for reflection on teaching. The study benefitted from conversation analytic perspective to qualitatively and interpretively examine the classroom discourse of the teacher-learner interaction. The classroom talk was analyzed th...