Communicating in a VLE

drawing upon information from JISC on computer mediated conferencing

God, there's a lot of material on here about how to communicate online. Actually, a lot of this feels familiar - I've spent time communicating online, and have bumped into a few of it's perils, and I've also discussed these with friends and colleagues.

I've learnt this elsewhere, but its incredibly applicable to education - given the absence of face to face interaction, and asychronous communication, it's vitally important that the shared norms of an educational space (how often communication should occur, between who, at what rate, in what volume, what level of critique is acceptable etc) should be really, very explicit and clear. In communication we take a lot of things for granted, which we probably can't do to the same extent in a VLE. It takes work to construct and maintain these norms of communication (and a hell of a lot of forum posts are actually serving this purpose). Also if people don't know what they're supposed to be doing, it very rapidly breaks down.

From a surveillance perspective, the permanence of the record is somewhat unsettling - particularly for education in politics (and possibly security). I'd probably be careful about what elements of a VLE I kept around after the end of the class. Possibly just completed work as a resources for subsequent classes, rather than formative discussions

Advantages:

• time and place independence

• no need to travel to the place of learning

• time lapse between messages allows for reflection

• speakers of other languages have added time to read and compose answers (and use translation tools if necessary)
  

• questions can be asked without waiting for a 'turn'

• it allows all students to have a voice without the need to fight for 'airtime', as in a face-to-face situation

• the lack of visual cues provides participants with a more equal footing

• many to many interaction may enhance peer learning

• answers to questions can be seen by all - and discussed.

• discussion is potentially richer than in a face-to-face classroom setting

• messages are archived centrally providing a database of interactions which can be revisited

• the process of learning becomes more visible to learners and tutors.

Disadvantages:

• communication takes place via written messages so learners with poor writing skills may be at a disadvantage

• paralinguistic cues (facial expression, intonation, gesture, body orientation) as to a speaker's intention are not available, except through combinations of keystrokes (emoticons) or the use of typeface emphasis (italics, bold, capital letters)

• time gaps within exchanges may affect the pace and rhythm of communications leading to a possible loss in textual coherence

• the medium is socially opaque; participants may not know who or how many people they may be addressing

• the normal repair strategies of face-to-face communication are not available and misunderstandings may be harder to overcome

• context and reference of messages may be unclear and misunderstandings may occur

• loss of spontaneity and quick-thinking and response type of debate / discussion.

The thing to note here is that these are not all advantages and disadvantages for the same party, and therefore there is an acess/equality dimension to this, and also a need for sensitivity to those differences.

this is quite important, and I think relates to the concept of 'work' up-post:

'If knowledge construction is the task, then the sharing of different perspectives through debate and dialogue is, within a social constructivist framework, a precondition for it but does not simply constitute it. Getting to the point of actually constructing new knowledge (new to individuals and maybe new in the public domain) requires skilled, sustained, purposive and directed analytic and creative conceptual communication practices' (Edwards, 2002).