1. The Impact of Content Type on Educational Dialogues Andrew Pyper and Mariana Lilley University of Hertfordshire

2. Background Importance of social/ collaborative work The sheer amount of information students have to contend with Impact of technology on this

3. Learning Content Types Disposable Durable

4. Disposable Content Usually a by product of some conversation/ learning activity Not intrinsically useful Without technology little, if any, of this type of content is retained Transient

5. Durable Learning Content The intended product of some learning and teaching activity. Egs- essays, books, wikis Independence from context Potential for re-use

6. An example-tutorial A face to face discussion An online discussion

7. Implications Using technology makes it much more likely that learning content will be stored We argue that this is a problem when disposable learning content is stored Particularly a problem where an educational dialogue is taking place.

8. Discussion Forums Discussion forums especially vulnerable Support educational dialogues, but store disposable learning content Hence, the focus of our study

9. The Study Attempted to create a separation between disposable and durable content using discussion forums. Discussion forum properties: Fully anonymous postings by students (staff still post under their names); Limited duration; Student summaries of discussion; Temporary (deleted after a time).

10. The Study Invited students to join the discussion forums Discussion Subjects- Difference between a scripting language and a programming language and the Likert Scale

11. Results- Posting Activity First set of forums

12. Results- Posting Activity Second set of forums (student review of the first set of discussions)

13. Results Forum Features Number of Positive Comments Number of Negative Comments Anonymity151 Duration76 Summary82 Deletion15

14. Results Indications that there was an effective separation between disposable and durable learning content Some support from student comments and the way they responded to discussion

15. Student Comments A lot of time and effort must have gone into the contributions made to each discussion therefore I vote to keep the discussion but close it off from further postings once it has expired I do plan on reading all the messages on the thread again and saving what I think is useful I think it is nice to keep the discussion archived, for future reference It is the student's choice if they choose to browse thru a long list of postings…