This study reports the effects of using word clouds to support students' knowledge integration from online inquiry as demonstrated by blog posts, tags and concept maps. Fifty-four undergraduate students from a medium-sized university in the northwestern United States were randomly assigned into two groups and blogged for five weeks. To support…

Group discussions are critical for students constructing new understanding and knowledge in both classroom and distance education. Tagclouds can provide an intuitive overview about the group's collective knowledge and could potentially be used as an anchor for group discussions. The effect of using tagclouds as anchors for group discussions was…

Reflective learning refers to a learner's purposeful and conscious manipulation of ideas toward meaningful learning. Blogs have been used to support reflective thinking, but the commonly seen blog software usually does not provide overt mechanisms for students' high-level reflections. A new tool was designed to support the reflective…

Reflective learning can assist a learner's purposeful and conscious manipulation of ideas toward meaningful learning and knowledge integration. Blogs have been used to support reflection, but Blogs usually do not provide overt mechanisms for students to make connections between different parts of an experience, which is integral to reflective…

Deep cognitive thinking refers to a learner's purposeful and conscious manipulation of ideas toward meaningful learning. Strategies such as journaling/blogging and peer feedback have been found to promote deep thinking. This article reports a research study about the effects of two different blog leader styles on students' deep thinking as…

Recently, attempts have been made to use Weblogs and other personal webpublishing technologies to support individual and social reflection in higher education. Weblogs can be highly individual and reflective in nature, and students' experiences and perceptions of the technology and practice are of primary importance in furthering educational use.…

Theories about reflective thinking and deep-surface learning abound. In order to arrive at the definition for "reflective thinking toward deep learning," this study establishes that reflective thinking toward deep learning refers to a learner's purposeful and conscious activity of manipulating ideas toward meaningful learning and knowledge…

Reflection is an important prerequisite to making meaning of new information, and to advance from surface to deep learning. Strategies such as journal writing and peer feedback have been found to promote reflection as well as deep thinking and learning. This study used an empirical design to investigate the interaction effects of peer feedback and…