Here, with similar immodesty, is an older piece I wrote for our local teaching tips newsletter, with some other tried and more-or-less true electrowriting ideas. The "technical details" part at the end is highly specific to the u of c system but I leave it in because--well, for some reason or other. Question--do you think the duck is specifically waiting for the word "web" or is it just waiting for something that sounds sort of technological? Doug -- Electronic Conferencing in the Classroom: Creating a Dialogic Environment for Learning Doug Brent Faculty of General Studies e-mail: dabrent As classes get larger and money for tutorials gets scarcer, teaching tends to become increasingly monologic and students to become passive recipients of knowledge rather than active learners. Even in smaller classes in which oral interaction is possible, written assignments are a dialogue only between the student and the instructor-as-evaluator. The ideal of learners making knowledge together in a discourse community becomes almost impossible to attain. Electronic discussion groups provide an opportunity to change these one-way flows of knowledge into a more genuine dialogue in both small and large classes. The Discuss system, a form of electronic bulletin board, provides electronic meetings in which students can post messages ranging from conversational notes to short research assignments. Once posted, these messages can be read and responded to by everyone in the class. This opens up a new instructional dynamic. First, everyone gets a chance to "speak"; shyer students, or students who appreciate the opportunity to formulate thoughts carefully before making them public, can participate more easily. Second, it allows students to collaborate on assignments, readings, exam preparation, and other academic activities without having to find time in conflicting schedules to meet face-to-face, as they do in conventional group projects. Third, it allows students to feel as though they are being read by someone other than the instructor. They become active participants in the construction of their own knowledge rather than merely absorbing data and repeating it back. In addition to these benefits, electronic conferencing introduces students to the electronic universe itself. Given the current intensity of "electronic revolution" rhetoric, we owe it to students to give them a chance to experience and critically examine the new electronic media from the inside rather than merely reading about it in Time magazine. This opportunity may be particularly important to students working outside of disciplinary areas that normally emphasise computers as communication tools. Here are some of the specific ways in which Discuss can be used in the classroom: Informal discussion of issues relevant to the course. An instructor can simply set up a meeting and open the space for student-initiated discussion, or post prompt questions and ask for response. If this is not a required part of the course, only a few students may participate. However, students can be required as part of the course to post a certain number of responses. In one sense, this is antithetical to the spirit of open dialogue, but, like marks for "class participation," it is a way of forcing students to at least try a new mode of discussion. Some students will fulfill minimum requirements and disappear, but others will become engaged in the discussion and use it as a true discussion tool. I suggest that these postings should be graded only on a pass-fail basis if at all. If students feel that their responses are being weighed and measured for quality and quantity, they will perform actions that look like conversation but are really directed at the unseen evaluator lurking over their electronic shoulders. Collaboration on projects. One way of involving students in each others' work is to require them to post a brief proposal and working bibliography several weeks before a project is due. I also require them to respond to at least one other proposal by a given date. Again, some students respond with a perfunctory message along the lines of "Your proposal sounds good to me" and log off. Others, however, begin to connect with other proposals that are similar to theirs, offering helpful suggestions, borrowing ideas, sharing library resources. Comments begin to flow such as "I think I know a good book about . . . " or "Why dn't you talk to . . . " Aside from improving their projects, this process gives them a taste of operating in a supportive community. Collaborative studying. This can take many forms, but I have found that collaborative studying works best when it some prompting is involved. Several weeks before an exam, I post a list of specific questions that reflect the general body of material that will be covered on the exam. Each student is required to post a provisional response to one of the questions, even if the response is no more than a plea for help or an expression of confusion. Students begin threads of conversation in which they try to help each other understand the material, in the process improving their own understanding. Depending on pedagogical goals, the instructor can either dip in from time to time to clarify points or let the students wrestle with the material on their own. The former helps ensure that the students understand the material correctly; the latter enhances the dialogic process itself. Shared research. A full-blown research paper is simply too big to deal with effectively in the Discuss environment. Uploading is difficult and scrolling back and forth through text is a challenge. But I have frequently used electonic conferencing to introduce a small amount of original work into a course that is too large for a full-scale written assignment. I ask students to find one or more sources on a topic and post a short summary of their research--no more than about fifty lines--which explains and comments on the significance of the material in a form that can be understood by someone who has not read the original sources. I also require them to comment on at least one other posting by a given date, thereby assuring them that they will have an audience besides me. Because it is more formal, this use of Discuss is more amenable to grading. I post grades privately, by ID number only, but I comment publicly by posting paragraph-length holistic comments that indicate what I found most intersting about each summary and where I would have liked more information, what I found difficult to understand, et cetera. My object is to provide a sense that someone is genuinely interested in reading these postings rather than simply justifying a grade. Further possibilities. One limitation in the research project described above is that the process comes to an end once the summaries are posted and responded to. It seems a waste not to do more with such a rich source of knowledge. In future I plan to divide students into working groups with different topics. Members of each group will post their preliminary research, and then they will identify connections among the sources and prepare a brief report that draws conclusions from these connections. The most developed stage of collaborative work would involve groups of students composing co-authored texts. Aside from the difficulties of any co- authorship, the Discuss system is simply not sophisticated enough to support such projects because it does not allow transactions to be edited once they are posted. However, a more sophisticated conferencing system is planned; once it is in place, new possibilities will open. Electronic conferencing is no panacea for the isolation and the monologic learning that is escalating within the modern university. It is also not without cost to the instructor, who must be prepared to make a considerable investment in familiarizing students with the system, trouble-shooting problems, and responding to postings. But it can provide a middle ground between fully developed written assignments and machine-marked tests, and it can change the dynamics of the classroom from instructor-student interaction to a network of interactions in a discourse community. Technical Details The system requires some familiarization, but with guidence even the most technophobic student can learn to use it after some inevitable false starts. Students can access the system from any campus microlab that has a Develnet connection, or from a home computer equipped with a modem. Here are the steps involved in setting up electronic meetings using Discuss. 1. Obtain computer accounts for your class by filling out an Online Course Registration Form at Academic Computing Services. Ideally, this is best done just after the drop/add date for the class. However, a few students are always missed because of late registrations and other glitches. These students can be given individual registration forms and added later. Your students will be assigned to a group named after your course. All students in the course XYZ201 would be placed in a group called xyz201. This allows you to restrict your meetings to students who are in your course group. 2. Create one or more Discuss meetings using the mkds (make_discuss) coomand. See the usernote Electronic Meetings on AIX Using Discuss. If you make the meeting private, you will be prompted for a list of users who should have access to the meeting. To set access permission for a course with the groupname XYZ201, you would enter *.xyz201 3. Make sure that your students can access the appropriate meetings. This is easier said than done. To gain access to meetings manually, each user must use the am (add_meeting) command with the full path for each meeting she wishes to attend. To add a meeting called "project" located in my home directory, for example, each of my students would have to enter the following from the Discuss prompt: am acs:~dabrent/mtgs/meeting This process is not inherently difficult but tricky enough that you can end up spending more time getting your students properly set up than you spend teaching the class. To simplify the process, ACS has designed a system that allows you to create a setup script for your course. The first time your students log into the system, they can run this script to modify the behaviour of the system in ways you have specified. The script can substitute the simpler pico editor for the emacs editor, pre-set electronic mail options to eliminate some confusing prompts, and automatically add the discuss meetings you have created. Contact ACS for detailed information on this system. Students who have computer accounts related to previous courses may be denied access to your meetings because their primary course group is still set to their previous group. If so, they can change their primary group by issuing the command newgrp xyz201 If you would like a copy of the instruction sheet I have prepared for my students, e-mail or telephone me and I can send it to you by e-mail or in hard copy. If you send me a diskette I can send you a Word Perfect 5.1 file so that you can modify it to suit your own needs. From: Self <ACADEMIC/HUNT> To: [log in to unmask] Subject: plea for help (quick. please)