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Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
The article is subtitled "A Pedagogical Strategy for Taming the Chat Beast" and that gives a pretty good sense of his attitude toward chat. No chaos and disorder for him! "The sense of community and connectedness was overshadowed by frustration. I wanted to have the opportunity to interact with the students in a more spontaneous manner while still retaining some semblance of order that would replicate a seminar-type environment." Most of the suggestions have to do with keeping quiet when other people are talking and staying on topic. The thing is, though, chat is natively a multi-threaded environment (that is, people are used to conducting several conversations at the same time) and forcing it into a single thread makes it stiff and unnatural.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Nov 23, 2024 4:59 p.m.

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