Materiality of Online Students’ Peer-Review Activities in Higher Education

Abstract

In spite of the widespread use of technology in higher education, discourses on learning technologies commonly account for their features as disembodied from their use. There have so far been few theoretical approaches that have delved into "the technology question" in CSCL. We present an empirical study that investigates how students’ peer-review activities are entangled with sociomaterial aspects of mediated collaborative learning. The students' peer-review activities were analyzed according to the Collective Instrument-mediated Activity Situation (CIAS) model, and findings show that the materiality of two different tools had considerable influence on how students engaged with the texts and how they interacted with each other.