Korean teachers are generally considered well trained to integrate ICT into their teaching since the inception of the first IT Master Plan of Korea in 1996. However, the emergence and adoption of cutting-edge technologies create demands for evolving roles and competencies of teachers in the new knowledge society. Given this changing landscape of teacher education, the purpose of this paper is to explore new educational approaches to enhance teachers' ICT capabilities in the 21st century learning environment in Korea. The literature indicates that the new roles of teachers include new media literacy skills and adaptive expertise with efficiency and innovation. From this perspective, we examined three cases: (1) learning Scratch for computational and creative thinking, (2) learning robotics as emerging technology for convergent and divergent thinking, and (3) learning by design with ICT for systems thinking. The new approaches, such as focusing on thinking skills rather than technical skills, and providing various contexts different from ordinary classroom lessons, help teachers to develop adaptive expertise. On the other hand, participants in all three cases indicated difficulties in integrating new ideas, dealing with various course activities, and understanding unfamiliar design contexts in their comprehensive projects. For further studies, it is necessary to investigate learning processes and outcomes of teachers' learning with more depth and a larger number of cases and multiple sources of data to verify the potentials and challenges of these approaches more rigorously.
This study determines whether an activity system provides a systematic framework to analyse collaborative group work. Using an activity system as a unit of analysis, the research examined learner behaviours, conflicting factors and facilitating factors while students engaged in collaborative work via asynchronous computer-mediated communication. The online postings from the two highest and lowest performing groups of students during one semester were analysed, coded and reorganised. The coded postings of these four groups were then compared using an activity system to identify the difference in patterns of learner behaviours. The conflicting and facilitating factors that students encountered were identified as well. The findings provide implications for online collaborative learning environment design and mediating strategies. The study also addresses some of the challenges in using an activity system to analyse collaborative learning activities and provides suggestions for future research.
IntroductionOnline learning has been expanded to harvest the benefits of traditional collaborative learning as studies show how collaborative learning results in significantly higher achievement and information retention than competitive or individual learning
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