Negotiating a New Culture of Doing Learning?

A Study of Interaction in a Web Learning Environment with Special Focus on Teacher Approaches

Abstract

The article examines aspects of interaction, learning and teacher approach in an
international, web-supported learning project, which was organised between three
universities as part of their programmes in teacher education. The study focuses on
interpretative resources which may contribute to how students perceive teacher
interventions and presence in web-based learning activity. The roles and actions of
teachers and students in a web-learning environment are not merely interpreted on
the basis of intentional verbalised moves. The negotiation of the presence and role of
participants is also guided by a variety of visual and linguistic cues on the web as
well as the discourses around the learning activities. From a research methodological
point of view, the article emphasizes the importance of data-driven research
paradigms and a wide scope of data-collection in mapping the complex context in
which the participants act. As for pedagogical implications, it seems that developing
successful pedagogies is not a matter of developing particular kinds of designs for
learning environments, new task types or interaction patterns alone. What is
important is to involve teachers and students alike in assessing the collaborative
processes of learning, aware of the complexity of meaning-making in web-supported
study.