What is reciprocal understanding in virtual interaction?

The aim of this study is to investigate what is reciprocal understanding in virtual web-based interaction and what does it consist of. The context of this study was an international web-based pre-service teacher education (N=116) course. The study is based on an idea of shared cognition and reciprocal understanding, in particular. It is assumed that reciprocity is an essential component not only of social interaction, but also of successful virtual interaction. Since many kinds of virtual interaction, such as e-learning, web-based courses, and virtual universities are rapidly getting more common in education, there is a need to analyse the issue of reciprocal understanding in web-based learning in order to develop more profound pedagogical models. The results widely show that during this particular web-based course there was reciprocal discussion between the participants. Participants had mutual negotiations and they discussed about issues from a variety of different viewpoints. Seven different ideas were found for the mechanisms of reciprocal understanding. It is concluded that this information is useful for developing a new pedagogical model for web-based learning and enhancing the quality of virtual interaction.

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