A number of factors may affect student interaction in an asynchronous online discussion forum used in learning. This study deals with student preferences for the subject line of messages and in what ways the choice of subject line contributes to coherence and interaction reflected in the textual and interpersonal functions of the linguistic items used. The study also attempts to determine what affects the choices made by participants. Nine separate discussion forums from three different undergraduate courses in English at a Swedish university were used in the study. A total of 98 students and 435 student messages were examined and a number of trends appeared. The functions of the subject line may be summarized as contributing to coherence by reflecting message content in a number of different ways. In addition, the subject line can perform other tasks such as maintaining social relationships among the participants. It is not clear in what ways the subject line contributes to interaction with regard to increasing the reading rate. The trends observed indicate that other factors than subject line content may contribute to whether students are inclined to access a message or not, such as when a message is posted and where it is displayed on the screen. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Motivated by a long-term goal in education for measuring Taiwanese civic scientific literacy in media (SLiM), this work reports the detailed techniques to efficiently mine a concept map from two years of Chinese news articles (901,446 in total) for SLiM instrument development. From the Chinese news stories, key terms (important words or phrases), known or new to existing lexicons, were first extracted by a simple, yet effective, rule-based algorithm. They were subjected to an association analysis based on their co-occurrence in sentences to reveal their term-to-term relationship. A given list of 3,657 index terms from science textbooks were then matched against the term association network. The resulting term network (including 95 scientific terms) was visualized in a concept map to scaffold the instrument developers. When developing an item, the linked term pair not only suggests the topic for the item due to the clear context being mutually reinforced by each other, but also the content itself because of the rich background provided by the recurrent snippets in which they co-occur. In this way, the resulting instrument (comprised of 50 items) reflect the scientific knowledge revealed in the daily news stories, meeting the goal for measuring civic scientific literacy in media. In addition, the concept map mined from the texts served as a convenient tool for item classification, developer collaboration, and expert review and discussion.
In this article we study how online teacher education programmes may enhance innovative ways of teaching and learning with Information and Communication Technology (ICT). We explore how online teachers are practising professional digital competence, in general and within subject areas, and to what extent they encourage student teachers to develop their own professional digital competence. Based on online teacher education programmes at two distinct higher education institutions (HEIs), we applied mixed method design including quantitative and qualitative approaches to illuminate the aims and the scope. Our study revealed that even if online teacher education programmes represent good avenues for stimulating teachers and student teachers to develop digital competence for pedagogical purposes, this aspect is poorly integrated within the actual programmes, although some interesting examples were demonstrated. By looking at the origins of the discourses on online education and on digital competence, we found that they derive from different stakeholders: while the discourse on online education origi- nated from the management side at both HEIs, the discourse on digital competence derived from certain teaching staff at the two HEIs. Our study indicated that there is still some way to go to innovative so- lutions and to develop the potential of professional digital competence in online teacher education programmes.