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This article reports a theory-driven experimental study that evaluates the effects of an annotation functionality on online social interaction and individual learning outcomes. The central hypothesis of this study is that directly addressing a part of a text by annotating it and then connecting each annotation with its related discussion can decrease coordinative interaction costs and result in a higher-quality discussion that favors greater gains in individual learning outcomes. To reach our objective, we carried out a theory-driven experimental study that compares two versions of an anchored discussion system: one with annotation functionality and one without it, both displaying the learning material side by side with its associated discussion in one window. Participants were 106 students enrolled in two sections of a blended-format course in health education. We assigned each section to a software condition. The examination of students' online social interaction centered on a fine-grained content analysis of coordination and knowledge construction activities as well as sequential analysis of knowledge construction activities. The results indicate that annotation functionality decreased coordinative interaction costs and stimulated more elaborated discussions that favored greater gains in individual learning outcomes. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Teachers in secondary education mainly feel responsibility for their own classroom practice, resulting in largely autonomous and isolated work and private learning activities. Most teachers teach separate classes behind closed doors and learn about teaching by teaching, often described as trial and error (Hodkinson and Hodkinson in Stud Continuing Educ 25:3-21, 2003; Int J Train Dev 8: 21-31, 2004). Moreover, teacher professional development has mostly taken place outside school, thus removing teacher learning from the workplace (McMahon in Educational management: redefining theory, policy and practice. Paul Chapman Publishing, London, pp 102-113, 1999). From the perspective of the development of collective capacity of schools, this is not a desirable situation. Teachers need to share their teaching practice and learning experiences in order to stimulate a learning culture in schools. In their work on communities of practice and school teachers' workplace learning, Hodkinson and Hodkinson (Stud Continuing Educ 25:3-21, 2003; Int J Train Dev 8: 21-31, 2004) conclude that a highly collaborative working culture is accompanied by a learning culture. Teachers learned from one another intuitively, as an ongoing part of their practice. They were happy to move in and out of one another's lesson, seeing the work that was going on. There are steadily expanding claims that teacher communities contribute to teacher development, the collective capacity of schools and improvements in the practices of teaching and schooling. Teacher community can be understood as a way to bring teachers together to share their knowledge and practices. As such, a community of teachers can be seen to offer an environment for teachers' learning. However, there seems to be no consensus on the definition and indicators of teacher communities, which are conditional for measuring teacher communities. In this article, we aim at the development of a descriptive model involving a definition, indicators and formation of teacher communities in secondary education in the Netherlands, shared by both practitioners and researchers in the field.

This paper reports a theory-driven experimental study for designing and evaluating two different forms of attention-guidance functionalities integrated into an anchored-discussion system. Using social constructivism as a motivating theory, we constructed a theoretical framework that emphasizes the importance of students' attention allocation in online learning conversations and its influence on message quality and interaction patterns. The development of the functionalities, named faded instructor-led and peer-oriented attention guidance, aimed to direct students' attention toward instructional materials' central domain principles while offering them an open learning environment in which they could choose their own topics and express their own ideas. We evaluated the functionalities with heat map analysis, repeated measures general linear model analysis, and sequence analysis to assess the utility of the developed functionalities. Results show that attention guidance helped students more properly allocate their attention in online learning conversations. Furthermore, we found that the improved attention allocation led to better quality of students' online learning conversations. We discuss implications for researchers and practitioners who wish to promote more fruitful online discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]