It is our position that teachers will have a key role in preparing future citizens to be ‘e-functional’. Being 'e-functional' entails many areas of competences, apart from digital and linguistic skills, not least of which are the ability to employ multiple literacies in order to work and communicate in multilingual and multimodal contexts. Even as students become increasingly more adept at the use of technology, schools must help them couple these digital capacities with the type of knowledge construction that they will need in an interconnected world in order to ‘e-function’ effectively.

Taking an action research approach, this project proposes specific measures for improving primary and middle-school students’ communicative and academic skills in order to better ensure their responsible participation in our knowledge society. This study designs and implements international, telecollaborative projects that present communicative and cognitive challenges to the students in order to pinpoint the necessary skills for participating effectively in a network-based learning environment. Due to the international partnerships between classrooms, students will develop other proficiencies such as English as a Lingua Franca and intercultural communicative competences. Naturalistic data is recorded, compiled and transcribed from these implementations in order to analyse, evaluate and expand on them. Results from the analysis will serve for an educational reference model that can be used in teacher education and other learning contexts. The study also aims to contribute to the growing scientific interest in the analysis of computer-mediated interactions for knowledge construction.