ABSTRACT
Two research questions were addressed by Oshima & Oshima’s study of CSILE in Japan: (1) how the asynchronous communication in CSILE, with or without face-to-face communication, changes learners’ discourse and knowledge advancement and (2) what scaffolds could support novice learners engaging in productive discourse in the CSILE environment. We noticed the following findings to be quite interesting:
The expert learners were able to use CSILE to improve their knowledge building activities; they recognized the usefulness of such a technology tool. In addition, they changed their roles assigned for face-to-face discourse in order to better prepare for CSILE communication. They used their CSILE discourse for self-reflection and identifying areas for improvement and adjustment.
The novice learners, who used CSILE frequently, recognized the usefulness of the tool. Those who effectively used CSILE set learning goals for themselves instead of task performance goals and were able to gradually adapt themselves to the CSILE learning environment by collaboratively articulating their discourse. Their synchronous and asynchronous communication became totally different.
The novice learners had a difficult time changing to a culture in which knowledge was built on argumentation, instead of knowledge telling. Lack of background domain knowledge may contribute to their difficulties in building arguments and in fully taking advantage of the information provided by the instructor.
