This week I had my first-ever online classroom chat experience. In the days preceding, I looked forward to it eagerly, not the least because it meant I could come home straight from work rather than scarfing down my dinner at 4:45, rushing out of the office and driving the interstate highway to the south campus.
The chat experience turned out to be more free-form and stream-of-consciousness than I had expected, as the class of about 14 or so began with small talk, moved on to two or three simultaneous discussions about our readings interspersed with small talk, and concluded (as I was signing off, anyway) with movie recommendations, questions about our upcoming mid-term and a slightly heated debate about social issues.
I've been told that not all chat programs are created equally. About half the class expressed dissatisfaction with our interface, ranging from confusion to annoyance to early sign-off. The dissatisfaction had to do with the seemingly random appearance of our posted comments, which made it very difficult to maintain a steady discussion, let alone follow two or three simultaneous discussions. The effect was something like a roomful of people shouting at each other all at once. Here is a (partially) fictionalized sampling of our experience:
B: So, according to John Locke's theory, words cannot have fixed meanings because they signify different connotations to various people depending on social, cultural and experiential cues.
C: i don't know why but i am suddenly hungry for pizza
D: Then answer me this, B--how can any of us ever understand each other?
E: we never will be able to understand each other the way this conversation is going, LOL!
F: i am with you, C! double pepperoni with extra cheese sounds really good =)
B: I guess we can understand each other based on what we collectively perceive.
G: I think social construction plays a role in creating a collective perception.
H: does anyone know how many questions are going to be on our mid-term?
B: But even the way we define social construction is limiting: to say social construction is a theory that everything is socially constructed gets us nowhere.
E: H, i think there are going to be two questions but i'm not totally sure
D: Good point, B. Just like this conversation is getting us nowhere!
C: mmm, pizza...
Perhaps because I am a complete chat newbie and don't know any better, I actually enjoyed the haphazard, frenetic structure. I understood that the order in which our comments appeared was determined simply by the order in which we pressed the "add comment" button; and once I adjusted to this strange phenomenon, the whole experience became a game to me. I skipped from one discussion to another, sometimes participating, sometimes just observing. I smiled at the carefully-typed philosophical comments mixed with staccato bursts of emoticons and chat acronyms. I laughed at the witty quips of others and secretly exalted when I managed to get in a quip of my own right behind the previous commenter. In a way, I enjoyed this format more than our usual face-to-face class discussions--partly because I had more opportunities to comment online, and partly because I was able to "talk" to people in the class I normally don't have much interaction with.
In his treatise,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Enlightenment theorist John Locke quotes what is probably a key point, as he goes to the trouble of saying it in Latin:
Si non vis intelligi, debes negligi.
[Translation: "If it doesn't make sense, it may be disregarded."]
I wish I had thought to interject this little gem somewhere in the online discussion. I certainly applied it when navigating our chaotic chat, and I think I will apply it to future readings I find unfathomable (or just plain boring).
On a knee-deep level, I think Tetris ultimately prepared me for this experience. At one time I was addicted to the Game Boy version. Though I could never get past level 3 or 4, I loved trying to make sense of the randomly falling blocks of different shapes and steering them to appropriate gaps before they hit bottom. Well, the online chat was pretty much the same concept--only without the catchy music.
