Asynchronous conferencing is emerging as a tool that can create opportunities for collaboration and support the inquiry process. This paper describes one such tool (ACT) designed within a specific pedagogical framework. The overall goal of ACT is to make cognitive processes visible and encourage reflection in students as they engage in critical thinking activities. This study examines the use of ACT within a graduate-level seminar and an upper-level undergraduate sociology course. We report on the tasks assigned to the students, levels of participation, and ways in which special features of ACT helped support specific pedagogical goals in the two courses. Using ACT helped the instructors meet their goals; in both cases, they reported that students displayed better critical thinking skills than in

Document registration and management Project name Representational tools in asynchronous collaborative problem solving

Abstract. An exploratory study of students ’ engagement in online learning and knowledge building is presented in this paper. Learning in an online community, composed of students (pre-service teachers) and experts (experienced in-service schoolteachers and academics), is the study’s primary focus. Students ’ interaction and knowledge discourse structures, arising from individual readings of academic papers and asynchronous collaboration with peers and experts, are investigated using social network and content analysis techniques. Additionally, several new measures for exploring structural-qualitative aspects of knowledge discourse are introduced. Analysis revealed several important trends. First, students ’ interaction was more intensive in forums where experienced teachers participated, rather than students only. Second, students ’ individual discourse structures in their postings were quite deep, knowledge-focussed and elaborated; while students ’ replies were short, usually focussed on specific idea and contained a substantial amount of non-cognitive information. Overall, it is argued that students were engaged with the individual and collaborative knowledge building in the online learning community. Practical implications of the study results for development of courses are discussed.