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.