Skypechatting was really interesting last night. Fast, fun and a little unstructured it felt like being in a classroom, where everyone finally gets a chance to talk and being listened to and answered immediately. By skyping the perceived isolation and asynchronous communication and interaction was finally broken and it felt like a community.
As a teaching tool I would see it as an opportunity to let people vent their ideas, emotions and opinions in a collaborative environment with immediate response. It could also serve as a channel to collect ideas, make provocative statements and brainstorm on them. If we compare it to a real classroom, it is more like a moment of liberation, where everyone has a voice that is heard and reacted to in real time.
The risk is that at the end there is no real listening and it is a little hard to follow the flow and the understanding of each other. On the other hand coming up with many different ideas concurrently it is an excellent stepping stone for further discussion and thought.
Comments
Interesting to read your reflections on the chat session - several people seem to have had similar experiences, enjoying the pace and the social aspect but finding the 'flow' hard to navigate at times. For me, that's one of the joys of chat, but it took me a good while to get to that point of enjoying the chaos!
I wondered what you thought of last week's readings too - it'd be interesting to read your thoughts on the 'natives' debate and whether the texts we looked at shifted or reinforced your thinking in any way?