Written Interaction: A Key Component in Online Learning

Abstract

Contemporary educators who view learning as interactive, discursive, and situated have argued that well-designed online conferencing environments may be particularly suited to provide the socio-cognitive support for learning seen as fundamental to constructivist pedagogies. In order to assess the relationships between online course design, participants' interactions, and learning, a first step is to examine closely and describe the nature of online class participants' interactions within synchronous and asynchronous conferences. In this article, I address the role of interactive writing as an integral element in the conceptual development that takes place in such online courses. I argue that the interactive textual environment of asynchronous online conferences is particularly facilitative of both social and cognitive construction of meaning because the nature of online interactive writing itself bootstraps the construction of meaning.