Thursday, January 13, 2000

Learning To Communicate Online Is a Challenge for New Distance-Ed Students By SARAH CARR Each semester that Donald J. Winiecki teaches a distance-education course, he notices that the online class discussions become more meaningful and coherent as the term progresses. Mr. Winiecki, an assistant professor of instructional and performance technology at Boise State University, says he believes this is not only because the students gradually learn about the subject and can speak about it more articulately. The students also learn how to apply effective conversational practices to discussions carried out by e-mail and computer conferencing. When participating in face-to-face discussions, most students automatically adhere to unspoken conversational rules, Mr. Winiecki says. They take turns when talking, and follow what is known among conversation analysts as the notion of "repair": When homing in on a specific idea, a speaker will refresh the listener's short-term memory by repeating a relevant point that the audience already knows about the subject. But when communicating electronically, new distance-education students often will send out a message without highlighting which message or specific point they are responding to. In other words, they fail to follow the unwritten guidelines of turn-taking and repair. "It seems to take about three months, or a semester, before novices begin to become sensitive to these issues," Mr. Winiecki says. At that point, they will begin to reply to messages by indicating the specific ideas to which they wish to respond. For example, a student might use colored text to highlight the passage in a previous message to which the student is responding. At that point, "the students are working smarter, they are not necessarily working harder," he says. At the end of the semester, Mr. Winiecki shows the students samples of their online conversations to demonstrate how their cyber-discussions have grown more sophisticated. "It is almost like an epiphany for some of them," he says. Carol Porter, who is taking one of Mr. Winiecki's courses, says students in the distance-education programs at Boise State first participate in a "boot camp" to learn to communicate using the new technology, but she agrees that some skills can be acquired only through personal experience. "I think in your first few courses, you are learning to work in the medium as much as you are dealing with the content," she says. "You might think you are being clear, but are really not being as coherent as you would like to be." Mr. Winiecki says that as the study of online dialogue progresses, professors might be able to incorporate a simple set of examples into their course orientation programs so that the students will be aware of good techniques for communicating online earlier in the semester. "They learn to do it naturally throughout the semester, but it is not obvious to them," he says. "It is like fish can't see the water because that is where they live. Students can't see what they are doing because it is so much a part of what they are doing." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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