Abstract

The regulative and semantic ‘distance’ of electronic conferencing may impede the topical alignment and the unambiguous interpretation of messages, hindering collaborative learning processes. Compared to a face-to-face environment, in electronic conferencing this distance may be caused by a reduced strength of online ‘context’. Explicitly defining the context of messages in an electronic environment may increase the writers’ co-intentionality and co-reference. An annotation tool is presented, strengthening the context by providing a document under discussion and enabling users to anchor their messages in specific passages of the document. Preliminary results indicate that the tool does indeed reinforce the context, focusing the online discussion around a certain topic (increasing co-intentionality) and providing a frame of reference for single messages (increasing co-reference)