Research Reviews

The Internet has been the catalyst for a range of new communication services and has become a platform for new forms of interaction. The interaction that occurs using the Internet can be quite different from face-to-face interaction which is an area that has been well researched. Online interaction can impose technological issues and restraints, and face-to-face cues such as body language, personal presentation, local context and spontaneous dialogue may not be present. Online interaction in education requires a new understanding of the domain and its effectiveness. A thought provoking concept paper Spontaneous Group Decision Making in Distributed Collaborative Learning: Toward a New Research Direction by Geoffrey Liu in the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching identifies education's lack of research and knowledge about the decision making processes used in online collaborative distributed learning.