Vicarious Learning and Educational Dialogue

Abstract

The Vicarious Learner project is investigating the role of dialogue in learning and, more specifically, how learners benefit from opportunities to 'overhear' other learners. We describe evidence of such learning by students using "vicarious learning resources" in a computer- supported learning environment. We argue that education dialogue has properties that are different from "everyday" dialogue. We see educational dialogues in particular as being about the complex alignment of concepts where the participants know that an initial misalignment is fairly certain. We focus on the distinction between exposition and derivation in discourse and discuss how this might describe what happens in learning dialogues.