Azilawati Jamaludin

This paper reports the impact of using a structured argumentation board and enactive role play in Second Life on students' argumentative writing skills in the context of the A-level subject General Paper. Students were taught the structural aspects of argumentation based on Toulmin's (1958) argumentation framework. The structured argumentation board, Voices of Reason, supported their argumentation discourse while the Second Life platform supported students' contextualised role-playing activities on the topic of globalisation. Students participated in these two separate modes of technology-facilitated learning in a cyclic, interwoven fashion, alternating back and forth between two cycles of argument and enaction. Data in the form of argumentative essays were collected at the beginning and the end of a four week intervention period. We compare the pre and post intervention argumentation essays written by the students based on Toulmin’s argumentation framework, contrast the findings with that of the control group's argumentative essays, and present the statistical results in this paper.

Computer mediated communication (CMC) tools have marched into schools to provide borderless teaching and learning to complement existing face-to-face interactions. This article describes how teachers have used CMC to facilitate asynchronous online communication among students' collaborative project groups in project-based classrooms. Secondary school teachers used the CMC tool to facilitate and manage students' learning in terms of brainstorming and challenging student ideas, building resources, and working collaboratively to complete group projects.

This study aims to investigate stream differences in asynchronous online discussions in the context of Project Work. Empirical evidence from literature shows that knowledge construction in asynchronous online discussions is strongly associated with cohesion and role structure in online networks. We analysed the social networks in two eighth grade classes from two different streams for cohesion and role structures. A total of 80 students in 16 project groups were involved in this study. All groups were facilitated by the same teacher. The findings revealed no significant stream difference for cohesion. It was found that groups which are more cohesive had high correlation values of structural role equivalence while less cohesive groups had lower correlation values of structural role equivalence, indicating the strong presence of dominating and lurking members. The findings provide evidence that asynchronous online discussions in Project Work classrooms provide possibilities for equal participatory activities and cohesive structures in groups of different learning abilities (express and normal stream).

This paper investigates the digital migration of Singapore youth to virtual worlds so as to better understand the dialectical interplay between living in the real and the digitally-mediated worlds on how youth construct their identity and sense of self, negotiate meaning, and make sense of their social experiences online. Situating this study within a context of the immensely popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft (WoW), this paper proposes the notion of a performing cyborg as a theoretical lens of looking at the interplay between the everyday, situated lives of digital youth gamers and their activities in WoW. The findings suggest a recurrent theme that challenges ascribed dichotomies between youth’s presence in the real world and virtual world in terms of their identities in play, their sense of embodiment, and their orientation toward work, play, and the spirit of communitas within WoW. We posit that exploration of such a phenomenon that indicates a more intimately enmeshed and dialectically coupled experience of youths’ online and offline worlds provides a fundamental framework for educators to better understand the impact of youths’ exodus to the virtual worlds and its implications for 21st century pedagogy. To this end, this work will strengthen current efforts in augmenting an understanding of the broader learning ecologies within which youth learning activities are situated, illuminating the interplay between youth living in the real and the digitally-mediated virtual world.

Using asynchronous online discussions for interschool collaborative project work represents one of the innovative practices in the Singapore classroom. With anytime, anywhere access to interactions among the students and teachers, the asynchronous nature of these interactions leads to new paradigms for teaching and learning, with both unique problems of coordination and unique opportunities to support active participation and collaborative learning. A research study was conducted to investigate how primary school students participate and learn in project work based on coconstruction of knowledge in asynchronous online learning environments. 10 teachers and 20 students from 5 primary schools participated in this halfyear long research study. Teachers crafted project tasks for implementation at the students’ level and these tasks were addressed collaboratively by the students who formed project groups with members from another school. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of students’ activity in the asynchronous online environment were conducted. Students’ sent and received notes as well as the frequency of scaffolds used in the online environment were evaluated. Each note was also ranked according to Gunawardena, Lowe and Anderson’s (1997) Interaction Analysis Model. The findings provided evidence to suggest that primary school students participating in the online project work learning environment were capable of the co-construction of knowledge up till Phase IV of the Interaction Analysis Model.