The following is my response (plucked out of context) from a locked-down conversation in Blackboard … placed here to serve as my rough notes when the powers that be delete my reflections in BB:
I have been intrigued with the parallel communication going on in the
text chat since I took my first distance ed class many years ago and from my experiences on EdTechTalk. My
perception as a student is that the backchannel is more than a virtual note passing
that is rarely facilitated (or even consistently observed) by the lecturer, but can take on a life of its own. As a student, I have
felt it offers both good and bad … sometimes the conversation digresses to
off-topic personal chatter, but many times it is a sort of life-line
for the distance learner, “When did she say the assignment is due?” …
“I lost your audio and can’t hear you?” … also, there is a lot of
informal banter among students that develops as the semester goes on
… “How did your presentation go at work last week?”
I have a
million angles I would love to study on this from simply an analysis of
what is being said (humor, social construction of knowledge, questions,
support / help), who is talking (all / some / just a few) of the
students, do all / some / few like the ability to use the text chat,
should the instructor attempt to merge the conversation into the main
channel, what about private chats between students that the teacher
can’t see, what about private chats between teacher / student that
others can’t see?
I am leaning toward studying the effect of
this type of communication on social presence as it is a construct that
gets to how the communication helps / hurts a distance learners
engagement, feelings of intimacy / immediacy, etc. As I discussed
yesterday with Dr. D, I feel social presence is an interesting
angle to consider in a distance learning environment because of the
ulimate effect on persistence, engagement, interaction, social construction of knowledge, etc. If the
backchannel can be used to enhance social presence, does it follow that
persistence, engagement, interaction, etc will also be enhanced?
p.s. In
terms of methodology, I kicked around a bunch of ideas yesterday,
including content analysis of chat transcipts, surveys, interviews,
etc. I looked into some content analysis software, too. Seems there is a lot out there and some free stuff, too. More on that later.