Highlighting as a referential and collaborative practice in multiparty video-mediated learning activities

This paper investigates the accomplishment of highlighting in multiparty video-mediated learning activities. The focus is on moments of screen sharing and the verbal, embodied, and digital resources participants deploy to draw joint attention to a referent on screen. Drawing on screen recorded data (90 h) from an adult education setting (i.e. online crisis management course) and using multimodal conversation analysis (CA), the paper illustrates that highlighting consists of carefully coordinated conduct, including the mobilisation of the cursor and the selection of parts of text in concert with talk and bodily-visual practices. The analysis shows highlighting as a referential and collaborative practice used: 1) to establish and maintain co-participants’ attention to specific topics and items (e.g. words) during multi-unit turns, and 2) to initiate negotiations of written content. The study contributes to a better understanding of screens and digital objects as collaborative and structuring resources and of how they can be meaningfully deployed in task-based online teaching and learning.