Abstract
The regulative and semantic ‘distance’ of electronic conferencing may impede the topical alignment and the unambiguous interpretation of messages, hindering collaborative learning processes. Compared to a face-to-face environment, in electronic conferencing this distance may be caused by a reduced strength of online ‘context’. Explicitly defining the context of messages in an electronic environment may increase the writers’ co-intentionality and co-reference. An annotation tool is presented, strengthening the context by providing a document under discussion and enabling users to anchor their messages in specific passages of the document. Preliminary results indicate that the tool does indeed reinforce the context, focusing the online discussion around a certain topic (increasing co-intentionality) and providing a frame of reference for single messages (increasing co-reference).
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Notes
This is especially in the case of learning situations, where students start the discussion with low levels of understanding of the subject matter (Cherubini et al. 2005).
Note that we are concerned with regular university education, where students do know each other. When participants do not know each other (as is the case in distance education), social processes are likely to be of higher importance.
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van der Pol, J., Admiraal, W. & Simons, P.R.J. Context enhancement for co-intentionality and co-reference in asynchronous CMC. AI & Soc 20, 301–313 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-005-0022-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-005-0022-5