Building and maintaining the common ground in web-based interaction

In this paper, the main purpose is to explore how participants establish and maintain the common ground in the computer-based conferences. Previous studies assume that before the participants can reach the deeper level interaction and learning, they have to gain an adequate level of common ground (Dillenbourg, 1999; Baker et al., 1999; Veerman, 2000). Subjects were 68 pre-service teachers and 7 mentors from three universities who participated in the web-based conferencing course for eight weeks. The results assume that in deeper level discussions it is essential that participants, especially fellow students did give not only the evidence about their own understanding by using written feedback, but also give the support to their co-students and show their attitudinal reaction in their replies.