Provided that effective practices in online instructional design are met and e-myths regarding online learning are contested, asynchronous online sharing, knowledge construction, and knowledge creation or hybrids of these 51 Brokensha and GreylingDispelling e-myths and pre-empting disappointment discourses. Within a naturalistic higher education setting, the authors revisited lingual data analysed in a previous study, employing Booth and Hultén's (2003) taxonomy of pivotal contributions to online discussions to describe students' 'talk' during text-based AODs. The taxonomy constituted a more comprehensive model of productive online discussion than that used in the earlier study. Contrary to the authors' initial assumptions as novice e-instructors that students would not only share knowledge, but also co-construct knowledge, there was little evidence of the latter. In terms of Booth and Hultén's (2003) analytic contributions were uncommon. In other words, knowledge-sharing discourse rather than knowledge-construction discourse was the norm. In addition, mismatch between the authors' expectations about students' levels of cognitive engagement during their discussions and the instructional design. Thus, the authors interrogate their assumptions and identify design considerations that should underpin online pedagogy as it pertains to meaningful online discussion.

Using CMM (the co-ordinated management of meaning approach), this article investigates differences between white and black first-year students’ interpretations of personal experiences of racism, emphasising the degree to which respondents construct these as linked to past systems of oppression, specifically apartheid. In the narratives thus collected, students racialised as white focus on encounters with restitution, while black respondents relate personal, face-to-face confrontations with racism in public spaces. In the themes that emerged from participants’ reflections on factors such as the motives/causes of prejudicial treatment, white respondents construct restitution as institutionally-sanctioned racism. Black participants link perpetrators’ motives directly to apartheid, but concurrently resist interpreting these as symptoms of a pervasive culture of racism among whites. Examining the results for correlations with Steyn and Foster’s (2008) work on white talk among much older white journalists, suggests that the discursive repertoires that mark these discourses impact the efforts of both white and black students (born in or shortly before 1994) to negotiate their experiences. As such, the findings offer insights into some of the prevailing beliefs that circulate in the sample under study, and are liable to affect efforts at social cohesion in a country where university spaces are considered as increasingly telling barometers of transformation (Soudien 2010).

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