Fay Sudweeks

With the advent of new media and Web 2.0 technologies, language and discourse have taken on new meaning, and the implications of this evolution on the nature of interpersonal communication must be addressed. Innovative Methods and Technologies for Electronic Discourse Analysis highlights research, applications, frameworks, and theories of online communication to explore recent advances in the manipulation and shaping of meaning in electronic discourse. This essential research collection will appeal to academic, research, and professional audiences engaged in the design, development, and distribution of effective communications technologies in educational, social, and linguistic contexts.

Computer-mediated collaboration is an important feature of modern organizational and educational settings but it is still compared unfavourably with traditional collaboration because non-verbal and paralinguistic cues are minimal. This book analyzes how virtual collaborative groups develop and how leaders emerge in asynchronous and synchronous computer-mediated environments using cognitive and affective dimensions of communication activity. A multi-level methodology (Complementary Explorative Data Analysis) is developed to enable quantitative and qualitative analyses of communication data sets from two different case studies. The results indicate that virtual collaborative groups in organizations and education institutions are highly adaptive to the task to be completed, and the medium in which they collaborate. The analyses have practical implications for managers of virtual teams and educators in e-learning.