The Role of Pedagogy in the Use of Networked Learning Environments

During the last twenty years, the introduction of new technologies in schools coupled with the recent growth of the Internet have allowed students access to a vast amount of educational resources. This vast increase in the amount of information, however, poses numerous challenges to teachers, since access to information does not automatically create better educational experiences for the students. The purpose of this study is to describe the nature of teaching and learning in six classrooms in which teachers used, for the first time, a web-driven science project known as Alpine. The Alpine project is an effort to mobilize the resources of the web in order to create an information-rich and complex learning environment that can support sustained exploration in science classroom. We first give a brief description of Alpine. Then...