Supporting classroom dialogue through developing the Talkwall microblogging tool: Considering emerging concepts that bridge theory, practice, and design

Through reflecting on a 10-year design-based research process involving teachers as co-designers, this paper develops a concept-driven approach for designing technology support for classroom dialogue. Specifically, we focus on four 'bridging' concepts that emerged from the research-practitioner partnerships, and on how these guided the design of Talkwall, an educational microblogging tool similar to Twitter. The four bridging concepts - a contribution, a feed, a wall, and a space for the teacher - are defined and discussed in relation to design articulations for Talkwall, the design of similar educational microblogging tools, and the role of material-dialogic spaces for classroom dialogue. A concept driven approach fosters intermediary forms of knowledge that may be significant for design-based research. This is because designers, teachers, and researchers can extend their repertoires through synergy and exchange between the researchers' scholarly knowledge and the teachers' craft knowledge. We exemplify this by examining how a concept driven approach enabled the exploration of new designs for material-dialogic spaces relating to Talkwall.