USE SYNCHRONOUS CHATS

The use of sychnorous chats was an important complement to the e-mail and ITV interactions among students and faculty. After overcoming the barriers to setting up a synchronous chat, it was also necessary to work through individual difficulties in logging into the chat and to develop a schedule for the chats with the peer mentor and the instructors. Here is the schedule that was developed:

It was also necessary to develop a sense of pacing in "print" chats which flows naturally when speaking face-to-face. We found that when two-three people were engaged in a chat (two students and the peer mentor or two students and an instructor), it worked quite well. When there were many students, the interactions were somewhat disconnected and difficult.

Given the challenges, it was amazing to see that there were similarities and differences between on-line and face-to-face interactions. The similarities focused on the types of interactions--when meeting face-to-face both task interactions (those that move toward a goal or completion of a job) and maintenance interactions (supportive comments to create a positive emotional climate) make for success. The same types of interactions were found in the on-line chats. Here are some examples of synchronous chat scripts faciliated by both peer mentor.

Here is some task oriented dialogue from the chat transcript:

Participant 1: Are people talking about their case notes...I know a case I wnat to use but I don't know how to focus it....too much.

Peer Mentor: ..Have you narrowed down to the main issues and what you want for story outcomes/case outcome?"

Here is some maintenance oriented dialogue from the chat transcript:

Participant 3 is nodding agreement like the puppies in the back window of cars.

Peer Mentor: Keep at it you two---wort stuff out---it's hard.

Participant 4 laughing out loud.

The differences in face-to-face dialogue and chats lie in two directions. First, there is the difference in accomodating more than two-three people. It seemed much more difficult to pace the discussion when over three people were in the chat. Perhaps this could be overcome by videoconferencing (which we plan to try next time). Second, the faculty were much more connected with each group than in the face-to-face version of the course. Faculty members circulated among the groups in the on-site course; now they interacted directly with each group and had transcripts to review to determine where needs developed.

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