This article situates comic-based representations of teaching in the long history of tensions between theory and practice in teacher education. The article argues that comics can be semiotic resources in learning to teach and suggests how information technologies can support experiences with comics in university mathematics methods courses that (a) help learners see the mathematical work of teaching in lessons they observe, (b) allow candidates to explore tactical decision-making in teaching, and (c) support preservice teachers in rehearsing classroom interactions.

Rich-media representations of teaching using animated cartoons can be effective at stimulating teachers' discussion about practice and hence help them learn productively from one another about their profession. Our research aims to design web-based interactive rich-media virtual settings for teachers to learn to do the practice of teaching. For that purpose, we seek a set of operational design principles that could be used to optimally exploit web-based interactive rich-media technologies. By operational design principles, we mean guidelines that facilitate decision making in the creation of learning conditions. In this article, we report on a study of the effect of embedded animated clips of instructional practice in online interactive forum/chat to support teachers in learning to notice and interpret critical events of classroom interactions. The study showed that both novice and experienced teachers actively participated in discussion and effectively noticed important events of teaching practice. The main findings include the following: (a) Embedding animated representations of teaching in forum/chat, by serving as a common point of reference, helps both novice and experienced teachers effectively notice and discuss noteworthy events in teaching practice; (b) forum suits novice teachers better than chat; and (c) both forum and chat suit experienced teachers in different ways. This study is a critical step in a design-based research agenda toward the building of more complex virtual settings for teacher education.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; layout-grid-mode: char;" align="left"><span class="text"><span style="font-family: ";Arial";,";sans-serif";; font-size: 9pt;">Constructivism is a learning theory that states that people learn by actively constructing their own</span></span><span style="font-family: ";Arial";,";sans-serif";; font-size: 9pt;"> <span class="text">knowledge, based on prior knowledge. A significant number of ICT-based constructivist learning systems have been proposed in recent years. A critical problem related to the design and use of this kind of systems has been the lack of a practical means to facilitate the instructional design process. Our research aims to help designing truly constructivist and adaptive learning environments. Our approach is based on a set of operational criteria for certain aspects of constructivism: We use these criteria as a useful pedagogical framework to provide tools and guidelines facilitating the instructional design process. One facet often mentioned as being strongly relevant to constructivism is cognitive flexibility. This paper presents COFALE—a new, domain-</span> <span class="text">independent, and open-source e-learning platform that could be used to build adaptive learning environments supporting cognitive flexibility—and an example of its use: the design of a course on recursion.</span></span></p>

We investigate the quality of user interaction in forums that used animated classroom stories to support mathematics teachers" conversations. An analysis of pairs of posts connected by a parent-child relationship helped understand correlations between an indicator (the presence of evaluation markers) and two outcome variables (the presence of reflection on teaching practice and the presence of proposal of alternative teaching actions) related to the conversation quality. This analysis shows that participants who followed up on posts from others were more likely to engage in reflection or consider alternatives if prior posts included evaluation than if prior posts didn"t include evaluation.