More on Educational Chats Taxonomy

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Dear Daf:

Congrats on a fabulous wrap-up page. Now I know from experience how time consuming it is, but worthwhile.

In the meantime, I've been going over the taxonomy for chats again and would like to tell you of an optional classification for the 'free-topic chats' that came to my mind: 'open chats' or 'open-ended chats'. However, I think I prefer your classification.

As to the informative chats or academic seminars/chats, I still prefer a more general and comprehensive term: 'presentation chats'. I think it gives a clearer idea of what I think you mean: the online equivalent of a f2f presentation. Right/wrong?

In addition to your examples, I'd be tempted to include in this 'presentation chat' category our 'Carnival' presentation last year at TI (my first ever online presentation!) and our cooking lesson at the Tapped In Summer Carnival 2002, though they are of a less formal nature, of course. But I would not include them under the 'academic chat' category, because I see the term 'academic' as much more formal and with a certain density and weight attached to it.

As for the last category, I would still vote for 'language practice chat', because skills and functions are part of a language. Besides, just practice seems to be too vague and does not necessarily imply just language, the aim in this case, right? It can imply other fields. Calling it 'chats to practice language functions' limits the scope, I believe.

Another three cents! ;-) Wish we would have more comments, because they are a great and useful taxonomy.

Hugs, Teresa

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Dearest Tere,

Thanks a lot for your comments on the wrap-up pages, and your reflections on the chat taxonomy, I will soon add your comments there, so when my mind is clear and ready, I will look at all the information on the table,and work on it ;-)

Hugs,

Daf

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Theresa refers to academic chats as "presentation chats," but that implies that one person presents something (information?) to others, when in fact, all participants may bring different kinds of information (and experiential learning) to a chat. Maybe "focused topoic" chats as a designation?
I don't think of focused chats as being focused on one person (a presenter), but rather as being focused
on a subject or topic.
--Elizabeth

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Dear Daf, Tere and all

As for the chat category taxonomy, I?m not sure about these definitions but need more time to think, as I?m a pretty slow thinker when it comes to putting things down in tables. The educational chat is already an existing category, not something new we?ve invented :-)

I?ve also noticed that the term chat is used as a genre of conversation outside the electronic communication, which is a fact that I sometimes forget, in Danish we have adopted the term Chat as an online phenomenon, while in a face to face situation, ?chat? would be translated as snak (smalltalk) , sludder (often understood as nonsense!) or sladder (gossip). Which is also often how the electronic chat is understood by people in general . And for that reason, it is increasingly important to present our
case for the ?educational chat? as we know it.

I would like to know more about how Elizabeth would describe an ?academic seminar? . I believe it would be less formally planned than a typical presentation with a professor in front of the students, and include more two way communication and invite for a true topic related discussion, but I?m not so sure, as thin is not always how I experience a ?seminar? at my own university; that would sometimes be like tree (more or less inspiring) lectures in a row, each with some five or ten minutes for questions, answered by the wise guy (and pretty often also asked by another wise guy)

Well, I will not let this be my last word on all this - but instead of trying to create a well formulated and all finished passage, I will hurry upta add to our knowledge pool and just give my two kroner or 25 ore
(smallest coin).

Info: Denmark is still not part of the monetary Euro conformity. One dollar is, today 6.9 kroner and one euro cost about 7.4 kroner. So, make your own calculations or go to the XE Universal Currency Converter at http://www.xe.com/ucc/ (thought you might need that URL, Buth, for your classes :-)

Hugs, Sus

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Hi All,

When I first was involved in CMC (as part of a research project about speech acts in cmc back in 1995*6), I remember we discuss it as a tool and a term to be incorporated as part of web based instruction. The topic of chit-chatting, however, is definetely a long journey for the ethnographic
researchers, I am sure.

One is the The Ethnography of Communication by Saville-Troike (1982). "Introduction" and "Basic terms, concepts and issues" In The ethnography of communication,. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Chapter 2 and 5 (by Cherny, Lynn) is mostly about Conversation and Community and touches on the
chatting a little bit.

> The educational chat is already an existing category, not something new we?ve invented :-)

Although it is not a new term, it might be a new concept to be defined for this new genre in CMC. Would you give some references to point us to read more about the educational Non-virtual chat in the literature?

arif

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Dear Sus and all Webheads,

Sus said:

The educational chat is already an existing category, not something new
> we?ve invented :-)

No, there’s nothing new over the Earth or World?, Animals were not invented by us, but biologists have classified animals into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, etc, through observation of the attributes they have in common. Chemical elements have always being there, but they have been classified according to their molecular components, just to mention two obvious examples.

One of the first skills we teach pre-school children is “sorting out”. You must remember the typical phrase “put together what goes together”, or “take out the one that does not belong to the group), being size, color and shape the first attributes recognized by children for their categorization of realia. Most of you, I am sure, remember “Sesame Streets” song “One of these objects is not like the other…”

At higher levels, we teach our students to recognize descriptive, comparison and contrast, classification, etc, kinds of texts, in order to learn the type of discourse used in each, as a reading and writing strategy.

Well, all this chit-chat just to say that a taxonomy of educational chats can be useful to know what to expect when attending a chat, to know what kind of moderation should be followed, to know the process that we will be involved with during the chat. For example, when you attend a conference, the presenter is not supposed to be interrupted in the middle of a presentation, the questions are asked at the end, unless the presenter decides to divide his/her presentation in parts and let the audience participate after each part has been completed. It is in this sense, that I consider a taxonomy of educational chats can be helpful to language teachers, you can select to have the kind of chat that is most suitable for your purposes.

Regarding academic seminars, you said:

“I would like to know more about how Elizabeth would describe an ?academic
seminar? . I believe it would be less formally planned than a typical
presentation with a professor in front of the students, and include more two way communication and invite for a true topic related discussion, but I?m not so sure, as thin is not always how I experience a ?seminar? at my own university; that would sometimes be like tree (more or less inspiring)
lectures in a row, each with some five or ten minutes for questions,
answered by the wise guy (and pretty often also asked by another wise guy)”

The way I understand them, and have used them in my post-graduate courses, is that some material has been prepared by the participants, and when they get together, everyone has the opportunity to share and discuss his/her opinions with the others. What I usually do, is that I assign a core material for everybody to read, or video to watch, and then each participant selects a different reading from a list, in this way, all have a shared framework, and then each one has something different to contribute with. What you may be referring to is a panel discussion.

Going back to the chats issue, I never pretended to be “inventing” the educational chats, just that being used to observing and looking for common patterns, I had the “insight” that there were different kinds of educational chats according to their purpose, the way they are moderated, and the role of the audience, and wanted to share it with you all. By knowing this, we, as teachers, may make a better use of them for learning purposes, hence contributing to give more quality to our e-teaching endeavors.

I am very interested to know why a taxonomy of educational chats bothers your research-minded spirit.

My 1€…. ( I cannot talk about “Bolivares”, they are worth nothing since we are not allowed to change them into any other currency, and cannot take them out of the country either, another characteristic that is moving Venezuela from a democratic country to a dictatorship, sorry cannot stop myself from using taxonomies).

Hugs, while I am still allowed to express feelings freely,

Daf

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Hi Rif,

My experiences so far is that many researchers in education CMC hesitate to take chat into serious consideration as more that a social tool. Not long ago, I went to a conference at my university and joined a presentation by one leading researcher in Denmark Elsebeth Korsgaard Sorensen (Daf was referring to a paper of hers some days ago), In Sorensen¹s study of a recent two year masters course of ICT and learning for educators, the chat had not even been used. OK, these people meet a few times during their course and they can meet face to face, but I wonder why that is so. This was a mixed modality course, and the conference system was VirtualU all asynchronous.
As these people are supposed to end up with sufficient e-literacy to teach other educators, I do find it striking. Especially when focus was on Œhow to make the collaborative process flourish¹!
I agree absolutely that the term Œeducational chat¹ is very useful in what we are trying to set up here, as a tool for analysis.
I had to google it to see if I was able to find references to non-electronic chats
Well, at least for now, here¹s one:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/96/12.12.96/photo-chat.html
It is a photo taken during a break with two students and a school
superintendent in a social situation, and the text is :

Educational chat From left, graduate students Chari Fuerstenau and Diana Straut speak with Judith Pastel, superintendent of the Ithaca City School District, before Pastel's public lecture on the Ithaca schools in 131 Warren Hall. Charles Harrington/University Photography
(As you see, no computers involved :-)
More on this later, Daf is hosting a chat in TI NOW

Sus
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Sus asked about an American-style academic seminar:

Usually a seminar revolves around the papers written by the students. The professor sets general
topic areas, and it is left to the students to figure out what specific topics would be appropriate--usually
in private conference with the prof.
   Everyone reads the student paper beforehand and then discusses it during the seminar, so there is a
shared body of "knowledge," as the background, and a specific example that all have read. In some cases the prof leads the discussion, i.e., manages turn-taking, in other cases, the student who wrote the paper is
also the moderator of the discussion.
   In pedagogy courses, as in TESOL seminars, the paper might involve everyone reading about a theory of
pedagogy and the "paper" would provide more in-depth analysis and a live demonstration, sometimes by using students in the seminar to learn, e.g., a little Chinese, sometimes with video of the student-teacher
using a method with live students in his/her class. Discussion would then concern the effectiveness,
limitations, good points of the method. The prof usually has had experience with a variety of methods
and helps the student-teacher plan the demonstration so that it is "true" to the method.
   So generally, the prof is setting up a plan of action whereby the students can explore a topic,
become familiar with others' thinking about it, and make it "their own" in a concrete way. And if the
most significant questions don't arise naturally in the discussion, the prof can always bring them up
herself.
   This type of academic seminar seems to me very like the WIA group activities, including chat (although the chat usually gets much more informal than most grad seminars).

   More questions on this?
--Elizabeth
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