The history of research on the community perspective in classroom research is briefly described first. Following it, the conception of the "community of learners" is speculated and its problems with considering 21st century skills are identified. As a solution to the problems, a new conception of the "knowledge building community" based on the epistemology of knowledge creation is proposed. Finally, classroom practices in a Japanese classroom based on the new epistemology is discussed as an example.

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This study focused on mentoring between novice teacher and expert teacher, which is aimed at improving teaching skill of the novice. Mentoring is defined as a process of which an expert helps a novice become independent. When focusing afterward on the children's behavior during the lesson given by the novice teacher, reflecting the lesson with an expert teacher is effective for the novice. However, there are three problems. First, it is difficult for them to talk about specific children or they tend to talk about abstract matters such as teaching skills or teaching theory. Second, it is hard for the novice teacher to make a correct interpretation of what the expert is saying. Third, even when teachers talk about particular children, they tend to be only a few. In order to solve these problems, we developed and evaluated a mentoring system called "FRICA." As a result of the evaluation, FRICA allowed novice teacher and expert teacher to focus on specific children's behavior and the novice teacher to make a correct interpretation of the expert teacher's explanation. FRICA was also effective in directing the teachers' attention to wide range of children.

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Japanese lesson study as led by teachers themselves has hitherto served to contribute to the professional development of Japanese teachers. On the other hand, lesson study has become difficult to perform in recent years in Japan. Factors that have been noted as reasons are the space and time limitations inherent in lesson study. To overcome this situation, the authors have developed a Web-based lesson study program, called the "eLESSER (LESson Study practitionER) program." Two expert teachers carried out the lessons and performed commentary activities and two novice teachers participated as observers. We found: 1) the four teachers thought that the eLESSER program was different from the lesson study they had experienced up to that time and effective as a novel scheme for lesson study. The eLESSER program has resolved most of the space and time limitations, and enabled deep and detailed discussion about classes. Novice teachers could observe the process of refining lesson plans by expert teachers. 2) Expert teachers changed lesson plans for classroom teaching based on one another's comments and discussion on Web sites of eLESSER. 3) The teachers came to consensus during the process of refining the lesson plans. It was confirmed: 4) expert teachers had reflected on their teaching while changing a previous lesson plan.

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SNS (Social Networking Services) was introduced as a support system for practical training of computer literacy at an university. At first, SNS was used during part of the semester (class period) to research the influence of learning efficiency and communication between students (Study 1). Then, based on Study 1's result, throughout the entire class period, the course was designed for the Blended Learning using SNS more effectively to support learning. The positive results of this study are as follows: students' class satisfaction rating was increased and communication between students became more active. And the "Information Freerider" was discovered. On the other hand, it was clarified that teacher's skill and working hours became more critical for the preparation and management of the class.

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This research focuses on parents' role in the development of young children's narrative skills. Earlier studies on the development of narrative skills have indicated that some parenting styles are effective in eliciting children's narratives, whereas others are not. Thus, the particular parenting style influences the development of children's narrative skills and also influences how they (the children) think. Based on the findings of these studies, I developed a system that helps parents improve their skills for eliciting narratives from their children. The system I developed was called 'Oyako de Monogatari'. Oyako de Monogatari is basically a web application that enables parents to share-with each other-how to make up stories with their children. In addition to helping children to make up stories with their parents, the application allows users to record these stories and also enables parents to share them with other parents. Further, it helps parents to regulate their learning. In order to evaluate this system, I conducted experiments in which twenty-seven parent-child pairs participated. The results revealed that the number of words parents used to elicit detailed narratives from their children increased when the parents reflected on their own videos and when they watched videos of other parents and children. Moreover, parents who showed considerable improvement in eliciting narratives from their children had the tendency to not only reflect their own way from others' good points but also to establish their own goals in each trial.

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This study investigated how graduate students participated in research projects conducted in collaboration with several university-outside organizations like local community and private companies from perspective of community of practice. As a result, it could be confirmed that (1) they had gained the ability to do collaborative research studies with university-outside organizations and (2) they had become to participate enthusiastically with high intrinsic motivation in the research studies through (a) their learning with peer interaction and interaction with others involved in the study collaboration, (b) their commitments towards the research project activities and (c) learning culture of the laboratory itself. In other words, the students learned technical and practical knowledge and skills of collaborative work done with the university-outside organizations in authentic situations. Moreover, the students' value on participation in such research projects enthusiastically with high motivation was born from their sense of learning satisfaction and achievement. And such kind of learning environment is maintained as the unique learning culture of the laboratory.

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In this research, we first clarified how Web 2.0 systems as social architectures are arranged and utilized based on students' report and on surveying the internet focusing on the activities of a community of web system engineers. In doing so, we shed light on how the environment for Web 2.0 system development is organized. Second, we conducted a field survey on a research project for developing Web 2.0 systems. Based on this survey we analyzed how the learning environment of Web 2.0 system development for students is organized. Finally we proposed perspectives for designing the learning environment of modern web technologies.

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We have designed a system for mutual assessment using PDA, which can be used easily without disturbing the ongoing activity and can provide feedback on others' assessments instantly. To assess others, a user has to point the terminal toward a target person. The bodily action of pointing with the terminal produces a natural awareness between participants concerning the assessor and the assesses.

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We have proposed a multi-step mutual-evaluation method and applied it to classes with more than 100 students to evaluate the learning effect. The method has three steps. In the first step learners submit answers in a subject. In the second step learners evaluate mutually some of the answers which are selected randomly. In the final step learners make self-evaluation about both their own answers and their evaluations of the other learners' answers by comparing evaluations by the other learners. The method has been shown to be effective in large-size classes. The mutual-evaluations are usually performed outside class-hours in large-size classes by using of a learning management system and are considered to encourage self-learning effectively.

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The authors created a learning community using the social networking service (SNS), where pre-service teachers can communicate online by writing diaries and exchanging comments in order to promote students' reflection on the pre-service teacher training, and to provide social support and a positive teaching and working attitude during the training. A classroom evaluation was conducted which confirmed that pre-service teachers did use the SNS to exchange social support among themselves. Sharing various experiences and opinions, by exchanging diaries or comments, promoted the pre-service teachers' reflection on their daily working experience. Furthermore, practical knowledge from other pre-service teachers who were receiving on-site training at schools served as foresight to pre-service teachers who were yet in earlier stages of preparation, and served as useful information for members training simultaneously but in different locations. It provided them with a positive attitude toward their training.

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Recently, the number of student who can not set well a theme of a graduation or master's thesis in engineering course has increased. In this study, we designed "collaborative inquiry activity" with the CSCL system which was named "ProBo" and practiced the activity in graduate school, so that such students could improve their own efficacy on the skill of theme setting. "Collaborative inquiry activity" is a activity in which students A) survey prior studies and related literatures, examine their positions and limitations, and make documents by summarizing them, and B) browse the documents, question and answer about them mutually, make a presentation of them, and improve them based on such activities. As a result of self and mutual evaluation and questionnaire, many of the students through the practice felt efficacy on information literacy and presentation ability and recognized effectiveness on mutual reading of documents and question and answer.

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We carried out a career education for junior high school students to bring up their interests for various occupations for four years from 2005 to 2008. The characteristic point of this practice is that we introduced mentors who have occupational career and give the students advices related to their job to conduct this practice in collaboration with a junior high school and a university, and an internet bulletin board system and SNS were provided for the students and mentors to facilitate communication between them. In this research, we examined some evaluations of the practice as a career education. At the same time, we analyzed the contents of the questions which were asked by the students and the evaluation of the mentors of this practice. As a result of quantitative and qualitative examination, we found that this practice received positive evaluation to the fact that the mentor and the students had opportunity of questions and answers. In addition, the characteristic of the questions asked by the students was clarified. On the other hand, the difficulty of deepening a relationship between the mentors and the students was observed.

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This study was aimed at identifying how group knowledge is advanced and how individual learners contribute to it from the perspective of distributed cognition by using the network structure analysis. The discourse data came from a group of five university students during a course on educational theory and practices. The network analysis manifested that cognitively important turns had significantly higher betweenness centrality, and that the betweenness centrality coefficients were decreased as learning went on. With the pattern of change in betweenness centrality coefficients in the group discourse as a benchmark, each individual learner's contribution to the utterance network was discussed. Furthermore, the relationship between the learners' contributions and their final level of conceptual understanding was studied.

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Statistical methods are used in studies of collaborative learning to analyze questionnaire and achievement test data. In collaborative group learning studies, the theoretical assumptions of collaborative learning, however, conflicts with the assumption made in the tests, namely that the samples are independent. In this paper, statistical methods for analyzing hierarchical data and clustered samples, which are consistent with the theoretical assumption of collaborative learning, are identified. Such methods are particularly suitable for analyzing aggregated data, and include regression analysis with robust standard error, hierarchical linear model (HLM), and multilevel covariance structural analysis (MCA). The special features of these methods are discussed.

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As Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is used over the world, interest has grown in the concept "Social Presence". Social Presence is defined as "degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationship". Social Presence seems to be effective on the motivation for learning and the satisfaction with learning. However, social presence has various aspects now. The effect depends on the aspect. It is desirable that the aspect and outcome of social presence should be organized for researchers and educators to refer to it, in order to design CMC tools, and evaluate CSCL. This paper aims to review the previous research about social presence from the viewpoints; aspect, research type and measurement.

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