The party analogy is also appropriate because it captures another important aspect of InterChanges: no single voice necessarily dominates the discussion. In traditional face-to-face class conversations, students tend to defer to the instructor, who can easily end up doing most of the talking. In InterChanges, the instructor's typed comments lose prominence among all the simultaneously generated messages; in some cases, his or her voice registers at the same level as all of the others. This partial redistribution of authority is also evident in the fact that students tend to participate much more actively in InterChanges than in face-to-face discussions. Whereas many seem to dislike public speaking, students become relatively uninhibited in InterChange's disembodied, text-only format. They experiment with and explore their own ideas in greater detail than they do in face-to-face discussion. As instructors, we try to support student efforts by acting mainly as facilitators, asking questions and making suggestions. After an InterChange concludes, a transcript can be formatted, printed on paper, and posted on the Internet. Students then refer to the transcripts when they study for exams or work on formal projects, culling and combining ideas to refine their perspectives and arguments. Due to all these benefits, InterChange helps us to meet our pedagogical goals of diversifying interpretive perspectives, creating contexts for collaborative learning, and enabling students to develop their own literary knowledge.
Of course, our class's InterChanges--as well as our conventional face-to-face discussions--contain their share of conflict. We find that disagreement and debate help us meet our pedagogical goals when they press students to consider the value of multiple interpretive perspectives. The challenge is to manage classroom conflict productively, and the idiosyncrasies of electronic forums can complicate this effort. For example, students can become uninhibited in InterChange's disembodied format and forget their usual social etiquette. Sometimes this effect is positive: a shy student might defend his or her position more strenuously, for example. On the other extreme, a more assertive student might become belligerent, hypercritical, and dismissive of others' views and arguments. Further, occasionally conflict is aggravated, or even produced unintentionally, when students (and the instructor) lose control of their "tone of voice" in the text-only setting. Nevertheless, our experience is that disputes in InterChanges can produce constructive results. The real-time immediacy of communication allows us as instructors to intervene in heated debates and redirect plentiful student energy away from less productive outlets toward more constructive ones. For example, if they engage in ad hominem attacks, we ask them to provide specific details about the position or claim that they are critiquing. The fact that InterChange participants occupy the same room at the same time can also support this type of redirection, since a reminder of the setting will recall some sense of etiquette. Later we will analyze a specific set of exchanges in an InterChange from Anderson's class to illustrate these principles at work.
InterChanges and conventional face-to-face discussions prove valuable, but they limit the range of interaction to the specific time and place of the class meeting. All members of the class must be in the same room at the same time. To expand the diversity of interpretive perspectives beyond these limits, we created a newsgroup in which members of our two courses could converse with one another. For those unfamiliar with newsgroups, they are online message forums--sometimes known as electronic bulletin boards--to which any participant can post a message at any time, creating threads similar to those in InterChange. However, unlike InterChange, newsgroups are asynchronous: participants respond to previous messages over time without the spontaneity of conversation. Newsgroup messages can introduce new topics or contribute to existing threads of discussion. In addition, whereas the messages constituting different threads in an InterChange appear in an almost random order on the screen, in newsgroups threads and subthreads grow in a hierarchical structure, with respondents' messages branching out in outline-like fashion below an initial message.
Linear link: Newsgroup Interactions
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Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature