The following is my response (plucked out of context) from a locked-down conversation in Blackboard … placed here to serve as my rough notes when the powers that be delete my reflections in BB:<\/p>\n
I have been intrigued with the parallel communication going on in the
\ntext chat since I took my first distance ed class many years ago and from my experiences on EdTechTalk. My
\nperception as a student is that the backchannel is more than a virtual note passing
\nthat is rarely facilitated (or even consistently observed) by the lecturer, but can take on a life of its own. As a student, I have
\nfelt it offers both good and bad … sometimes the conversation digresses to
\noff-topic personal chatter, but many times it is a sort of life-line
\nfor the distance learner, “When did she say the assignment is due?” …
\n“I lost your audio and can’t hear you?” … also, there is a lot of
\ninformal banter among students that develops as the semester goes on
\n… “How did your presentation go at work last week?”<\/p>\n
I have a
\nmillion angles I would love to study on this from simply an analysis of
\nwhat is being said (humor, social construction of knowledge, questions,
\nsupport \/ help), who is talking (all \/ some \/ just a few) of the
\nstudents, do all \/ some \/ few like the ability to use the text chat,
\nshould the instructor attempt to merge the conversation into the main
\nchannel, what about private chats between students that the teacher
\ncan’t see, what about private chats between teacher \/ student that
\nothers can’t see?<\/p>\n
I am leaning toward studying the effect of
\nthis type of communication on social presence as it is a construct that
\ngets to how the communication helps \/ hurts a distance learners
\nengagement, feelings of intimacy \/ immediacy, etc. As I discussed
\nyesterday with Dr. D, I feel social presence is an interesting
\nangle to consider in a distance learning environment because of the
\nulimate effect on persistence, engagement, interaction, social construction of knowledge, etc. If the
\nbackchannel can be used to enhance social presence, does it follow that
\npersistence, engagement, interaction, etc will also be enhanced? <\/p>\n
p.s. In
\nterms of methodology, I kicked around a bunch of ideas yesterday,
\nincluding content analysis of chat transcipts, surveys, interviews,
\netc. I looked into some content analysis software, too. Seems there is a lot out there and some free stuff, too. More on that later.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The following is my response (plucked out of context) from a locked-down conversation in Blackboard … placed here to serve as my rough notes when the powers that be delete my reflections in BB: I have been intrigued with the parallel communication going on in the text chat since I took my first distance ed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[194,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2940,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216\/revisions\/2940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}