Your technology may be better than mine was, but I tried to form groups across ITV locations and it did not work. I found myself spending more time working with the technology and explaining things to the students, than I was teaching. I gave up and just constituted same-location groups. It was less than ideal, but then again, so is the principle of ITV! Perhaps someone else had better results.
Yes, technology is not a problem here. We use Blackboard Chat--it's painfully simple.
The problem is structuring the activity. Normally, I might ask to students in small groups to, say, "come up with answers to these discussion questions, and provide evidence from the text(s) to support your answers." Easy enough in person--however when you do this via chat, it becomes awkward to engage in the sort of conversation would generate a coherent answer to the question.
I guess I am looking for better ways to structure tasks or new ideas for discussion activities. The overall goal of small group work in this class is to analyze literature and find textual evidence to support points and arguments.
Since I asked this question this morning, it occurred to me, for example, that I might assign students to two conflicting viewpoints/theses and have them argue their sides via back-and-forth chat.
