Chapter 8 summarizes findings and reviews the implications of previous chapters, including health and safety considerations related to screen time and online interaction. Specifically, it recapitulates guidelines on how to fit gaming and written online interaction into children’s lives in a balanced, principled way, to promote safe, collaborative learning with other children and adults. These guidelines also summarize previously discussed criteria for selecting and setting up appropriate videogame and social media interaction to maximize learning benefits and safety. These include the introduction of developmental guidelines and goals for video games, as there are for children’s books, to provide appropriate scaffolded support for children, including for the development of children’s first and additional languages. Suggestions for conducting further research using conversation analysis in this area are also discussed, to cover a range of similar digital contexts and age groups.

1 Introduction

2 Pitfall 1: Assuming that Cooperative and Collaborative Learning Are the Same

3 Pitfall 2: Assuming that Social Interaction in Group Learning Is Automatic

 3.1 Traditional Pedagogical Techniques

  3.1.1 Conceptual Approach to Structuring Group Learning: Johnson and Johnson’s Five Basic Elements

  3.1.2 Direct Approach to Structuring Group Learning: Structured Academic Controversy, Jigsaw, Reciprocal Teaching, Student Teams Achievement Division

 3.2 Technology-Enabled Pedagogical Techniques

  3.2.1 Dillenbourg’s Four Categories of Lines to Structure Collaborative Learning

  3.2.2 Scripting and the Script Theory of Guidance

  3.3.3 Knowledge-Building Framework

4 Pitfall 3: Being Unaware of the Need for Academic Skills

 4.1 Epistemic Skills

 4.2 Metacognitive Skills

5 Pitfall 4: Restricting Social Interaction to Socio-cognitive Processes

 5.1 Group Dynamics

6 Pitfall 5: Being Unaware of the Need for Social Skills

 6.1 Interpersonal and Small-Group Skills

 6.2 Skills for the Regulation of Emotion and Motivation

7 Pitfall 6: Ignoring the Students’ Dispositions toward Group Learning

8 Pitfall 7: Assuming that Online Group Learning Does Not Differ from Face-to-Face Learning

9 Future Directions

10 In Conclusion

Cooperative learning as a pedagogical method effectively reflects the communal character of the performing arts. By creating knowledge about Shakespearean performance collaboratively, students and educators lay claim to the ethics and ownership of that knowledge, an act that is particularly urgent and meaningful in the age of COVID-19 when we need to rebuild sociality.

This chapter demonstrates how communal writing assignments and digital, video-based pedagogy turn textual and performative variants in Shakespeare’s plays into a cluster of inclusive narratives for critical analysis. Shakespeare is no longer a white canon with culturally predetermined meanings.

One effective tool for communal writing assignments is Perusall.com, an open-access platform that incentivize and support collaborative annotation of texts, images and videos. Grounded in the notion of textual variants, the pedagogy encourages students to claim Shakespeare’s language rather than aiming for interpretations that are gratuitous or merely politically correct.

Working in tandem with collaborative textual analysis is video-centric collaboration. By turning a large number of performance versions into common objects of study, my digital video project makes links between adaptations that were previously regarded as distinct. In pedagogical contexts, the malleability of digital video puts play texts and performances to work in an interactive environment. Online performance video archives can encourage user curation and interaction with other forms of cultural records. In practice, this redistributes the power of collecting, re-arranging and archiving cultural records away from a centralised authority to the hands of student users.

This chapter explores the mechanisms and measures for implementing and evaluating the impact of networking practices in the online higher education environment. It draws on the extensive experience of a fully online Australian business school for working adults in using social networking and social activities to enhance learning, build community, impact professional advancement and create lifelong learning opportunities for alumni. This chapter also offers key insights into a pertinent question regarding the extent to which social activities should be facilitated by the institution, be self-initiated and administered by students or alumni themselves or be a hybrid of the two. Using the example of the Australian Institute of Business, we demonstrate that the latter is the most effective approach. The evidence-based best practices contributing to mutually beneficial formal and informal interactions are discussed in terms of student-centred institutional networking and engagement initiatives, networking opportunities using social media platforms, institutional benchmarking and data collection and institutional further learning activities.

Gail Prasad, daughter of an inter-racial, -cultural, -linguistic, and -religious couple, grew up with only one language, "the language of opportunity.” At an early age, she experienced systemic racism and exclusion, while navigating multilingual interactions as an act of resistance. Creativity and criticality are at the heart of her research investigating the coercive power relations among majoritarian and minoritized language users. She sees school as "a protected space for imagining and building more equitable societies.”

In its broadest definition, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is any learning that involves two or more learners as well as one or more computers. CSCL research studies how collaboration contributes to learning and how computer technology can facilitate collaborative learning. This chapter discusses CSCL in terms of four conceptions: (1) collaborative knowledge building; (2) dialogic interaction; (3) intersubjective meaning making; (4) group cognition. CSCL research demonstrates that collaboration among students – when well-designed to scaffold student interactions – is more effective than teachers delivering information to students through a recorded lecture or a synchronous video meeting. This chapter reviews major themes in CSCL, including: empirical studies of cooperative learning in groups; theoretical explanations of learning as an emergent, collective phenomenon; conceptions of knowledge as interactions between learners, rather than as mental representations in student’s heads; and the use of interaction analysis to study moment-to-moment collaborations.

This chapter discusses the mapping and collaborative mapping principles in multimedia learning. The mapping principle states that people learn more deeply from verbal information when they translate and integrate the information into a combined verbal and visuospatial format. The collaborative mapping principle is an extension of the mapping principle and states that people learn more deeply from cognitively demanding verbal information when they interact with others to jointly translate and integrate the information into a combined verbal and visuospatial format. In addition to describing the process of concept mapping, when it can be used, and the theoretical rationale for the two principles, the chapter systematically reviews the landscape of research findings for individual and collaborative concept mapping. Individual and collaborative concept mapping are both effective compared with other learning methods, yielding moderate and large statistically detectable weighted mean effect sizes, respectively.

In this chapter, you will learn how to plan your study around your existing commitments. You are encouraged to build on your strengths and improve in areas that may hold you back. You will learn how to find time to study and be kind to your future self. This chapter gives you an idea of the different kinds of academic support you may be able to access and provides some hints for using the online study environment to your advantage.

Learning at university is often self-directed, and the skills developed and employed in your nursing education can help to ensure you have acquired the graduate attributes needed to continue learning while you practice as a nurse.

This chapter provides you with strategies to enhance your study and to be successful in your learning endeavours. You will discover that you learn from your teachers and educators as well as from your peers and networks. You will be provided with hints for making both formal and informal peer support and group work function effectively for you. Finally, you will be given suggestions for using social media to help feel connected while simultaneously avoiding common pitfalls in your journey to become the best nurse you can.

This chapter traces the evolution of language learner autonomy under the impact of transformative classroom practice. It begins by summarizing Holec's definition of the concept, and then describes an approach to teaching and learning that sought to operationalize that definition, but with two added features: use of the target language for all classroom communication; and a strong emphasis on collaborative learning. This gave the concept of language learner autonomy explanatory power: learners acquire L2 proficiency when their agency is channeled through the target language. The chapter then turns to inclusive education, describing an approach to the integration of immigrant pupils that engages their agency by encouraging them to use their home languages in the classroom. This enables them to develop a capacity for agentive behavior in English and Irish with the cognitive support their home language provides. The chapter concludes by briefly associating the two learning environments described with the concept of plurilingualism as it is defined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

The rise of multi-party processes in which people with quite different ties to a region, natural resource-related industry, or environmental issue work collaboratively to hammer out mutually acceptable agreements is arguably one of the biggest shifts in environmental management over the past twenty-five years. This chapter engages in some sensemaking around this diverse and evolving phenomenon in two ways. First, an approach to designing collaborative natural resource-related discourse with a particularly strong theoretical foundation (Collaborative Learning) is presented to illustrate how theory is manifest in practice. Second a recent best practices/common features list is examined through the perspectives of four social science theorists: Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas Luhmann, and Muzafer Sherif. The practical recommendations that emerge from this list is largely consistent with the larger social and communicative dynamics articulated by these theorists.

Chapter 1 starts with a challenge that we seem to approach the current conditions of the world in which there is a simultaneously receding interest in issues of The Good, and an intensification in commitments to The Good. To move beyond the impasse of what could be characterised as a thoughtless relativism and a suffocating foundationalism, the author outlines the rationale for relational ethics. In this case, the ultimate value is placed on the nourishment of relational processes, the original source of moral value. However, in the contemporary world of conflicting traditions, recognition, awareness, and talents are required for encouraging and sustaining this process. Herein lies the major challenge for education. Sweeping reform may not meet this demand, as ethically consequential education can and should be integrated into the daily practices of school life. The chapter concludes that educational ethos, curriculum design, pedagogies, and evaluative practices are not simply techniques of knowledge transmission. When ethically informed, they hold the potential for life-giving transformation of global communities.

In Chapter 7: Learning Activities, you will begin creating a learning activity, which is the vehicle through which course topics are learned, skills are strengthened, and milestones are achieved, leading learners to the course destination. Learning activities involve self-reflection, dialogue, and application within the context of a realistic, relevant, and meaningful experience. In this chapter, you will explore experiential and collaborative strategies for developing learning activities.