Nine students took part in this seminar and most students sent 5-12 messages.
Altogether the students sent 117 messages to the online seminar and the total
number of words was 12950. Two students only sent a couple of messages at
the beginning because they could not attend all day.As the seminar lasted only a day (from 11am- 4 pm) there were 52 Instructions /information category
messages (mainly from the teacher) that were necessary to co-ordinate the
activity. We excluded these messages from the analysis in order to focus on joint
knowledge building messages although these Instructions/information messages
also included indicators of joint activity (e.g. deciding time tables for the
activity). The remaining 62 messages were all student contributions to group
report discussing the portrayal of science in media. Students mainly focused on
the news related to the Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) debate in the UK.
The distribution of student contributions to the categories of collaborative actions
is presented in Figure 1 below. These categories are not mutually exclusive, i.e.
a message could be marked with any of the categories above, so the total
number shown in the chart in Figure 1 is higher than 62.