Goal and Rationale of the Study
This exploratory case study1 aims to contribute to prior research on online and blended learning formats in telecollaborative teacher education settings (e.g., Arnold, Ducate, & Lomicka, 2007; Dooly, 2010; Develotte, Guichon, & Kern, 2008; Develotte, Guichon, & Vincent, 2010; Fuchs, 2006; Hauck & Lewis, 2007; Lord & Lomicka, 2007, 2008; Müller-Hartmann, 2005; Scherff & Paulus, 2006; Shaughnessy, Purves, & Jackson, 2008). The study explores how groups of student teachers in the U.S. collaborated with partner groups in Luxembourg on a wiki to design tasks for English language learners.
The goal was for groups of student teachers to explore technology tools such as podcasts, wikis, blogs, and discussion forums through model learning (Willis, 2001). Participants included one class of student teachers at a private graduate institution on the East Coast in the U.S., and one class of students enrolled in a public graduate institution in Luxembourg. Cross-institutional groups used a class wiki for collaborative writing and discussion, and they created their own group wiki as a platform for English language learning tasks.
In the next section, the author first presents research on the wiki’s potential for language teaching. She then outlines how participants used the wiki for the purpose of task negotiation and design, and how she used a computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) approach for exploring the computer-mediated communication (CMC) data.