Patterns in teacher discourse moves: implications for classroom networks

The convergence of 1:1 computing in education as a goal and wireless mobile technologies as a means to that goal has the potential to change one of the most basic of all learning communities: the secondary classroom. Here, the wireless network of mobile devices finds itself overlaid onto, and meshed with, the social network of rich verbal and nonverbal interactions among the students and their teacher. The author and a group of researchers at the Center for Learning and Teaching in the West (CLT-W) have developed a framework for analyzing teacher classroom discourse moves. The framework is being applied in a case study to identify patterns in the discursive interactions of the students and their teacher. An analysis of these patterns will lead to abstractions that refine the wireless network itself and render it a more useful partner to the social network in which it is deployed.