ABSTRACT
The pictures here (see Figure 38.1) will be familiar to most who have had any contact with educational settings in the last 20 or so years. Indeed, one of our most recent books (Littleton & Mercer, 2013) reected on one of the rst pieces of research into school-classroom based dialogue from that time. There, it was noted that in many cases group work around computers was conducted not due to any underlying pedagogic strategy, but because of a lack of resources. For many this will be a familiar story, but along with colleagues, we have spent considerable eort in investigating what constitutes eective learning in group activity particularly that mediated by technological devices. Of course, many educators – as was the case in that original research – will have had the experience of frustration in some such situations, nding occasions when group work seemed to be ineective and suspecting that a better use of resources would be to set students on individual tasks. Indeed, what is so potent about many new technologies is their ability to open up new worlds of learning for individuals. Yet, in this chapter we will argue that to see technology as primarily an individual pursuit is to miss out on two important considerations: rstly, many modern technologies vastly expand the potential for inter-textual and inter-active elements (Wegerif, 2013) through our interaction with which we are exposed to the thoughts and arguments of others and, secondly, technology can be an invaluable aid in resourcing and supporting both co-located and remote small group activity.
