When More Talking isn't More Learning

Sarah Fitri is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research plans, designs, implements, and evaluates a collaborative, participatory, and contextualized design-based teacher professional development program in a limited resource setting in Indonesia. Her research and teaching expertise spans teacher professional development, English as a Foreign Language instruction, digital education, educational dialogue, and design-based and mixed-methods research.

Online dialogic exchanges, forum threads, messaging histories, collaborative annotations, and email correspondence, are increasingly treated as primary sources for understanding how communities construct knowledge. However, common approaches often focus on volume, sentiment, or participation rather than what dialogue actually produces intellectually. This four-hour hands-on workshop introduces Tech-SEDA, a technology-mediated dialogic framework developed by Hennessy (2025) at the University of Cambridge, for systematically analysing text-based interaction.

Participants learn to identify dialogue moves such as Building on Ideas, Challenge, Reasoning, Inquiry Invitation, Reference Back, Reasoned Coordination, and Reflection on Dialogue, distinguishing exchanges that cumulatively develop ideas from those that primarily circulate information. Participants bring a short exchange from their own research or work with a provided extract. Through worked examples, individual coding, paired comparison, and calibration of disagreements, they develop practical and defensible coding judgements. The workshop concludes with participants producing a code-frequency table and short interpretive paragraph from their coded extract; portable analytical outputs they can immediately apply to their own research.

Participants will need to bring their own laptop.

Our CDH Methods workshops have limited places and are prioritised for students and staff at the University of Cambridge. However, if space is available, we welcome all participants who want to learn and apply digital methods and use digital tools in their research.

This session may be of particular interest to:

• PhD students in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
• Early Career Researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

If you have specific accessibility needs for this event, please get in touch. We will do our best to accommodate any requests, however please note that the building is grade 2 listed and has 4 steps into the building so unfortunately wheelchair access is not available.

This workshop is part of our Methods Fellowship programme, which develops and delivers innovative teaching in digital methods. You can read more about the and view the complete series of .