Post 7: Online conversation: A new challenge for researchers

I find this week’s readings about online conversation insightful to the cooperative project we are doing for a core inquiry course. We are assigned to observe an online live discussion through Twitter organized by Kinderchat, an organization dedicated to facilitating “an ongoing global dialogue among those active in the teaching and learning community of Young Children.” The live session on Monday night is moderated and participated in usually by kindergarten teachers each week.

I do not agree with the call to abandon the online/offline divide either. Even though I just started to learn to examine this way of modern interaction, I have noticed that there are quite a number of ways in which this virtual interaction differs from our face-to-face one. It not the contents or data that matter. Social semiotics tends to focus on the modes of communication, i.e., how each mode is shaped historically, socially and culturally and how our communication is defined by the affordances and constraints of the mode. These rules can be applicable to online conversation too. Based on my humble observation, some patterns are quite obvious in Twitter conversations but can be impossible for offline interactions. And these differences are first of all results from the different nature of these two modes.

I would like to share such a patter developed through an observation of a discussion session. I focused on the conversation overlapping and straddling characteristic of online live chatting interactions as opposed to face-to-face ones. I have noticed that in a group conversation setting, it’s quite likely for people to divide themselves into small engaging sub-groups if the whole group consists of more than three people. This happened so often when four or five of us fellow teachers gathered to have lunch in the cafeteria. Like face-to-face interaction, the discussion in Kinderchat was also dominated by and operated through sub-group interactions with separate interest focus despite the overarching moderator effort. As the discussion began, participants were asked to share their favorite story books and the Junie B Jones books attracted so much attention that the discussion over why or why not it’s controversial lingered on even after the moderator initiated another question. It followed that a small group moved on to the new question of why reading aloud is important to children while the rest of the group lingered on the old issue of Junie B controversy.

However, unlike group discussion in a physical setting, the nature of a virtual group interaction mediated by printing, more lasting than the ephemeral and lineal oral tradition, allowed the continuation of an old topic, overlapping with a new line of interest. What was even more otherwise impossible is the noticeable fact that several interlocutors were straddling between the question group and the Junie B Jones group. On the contrary, once subgroups have formed in a physical space, one has to leave one subgroup in order to join another. And once the topic is over, it’s over. There is almost no chances for it to be reactivated.

The lingering, overlapping and straddling pattern could be observed all along the discussion. This was beneficial for those late comers, who still had the chance to respond to the first question while the majority of the group were discussing question 3. One chatter‏ came in late but was still asked about his favorite books, the introductory question. It seemed that none of them missed anything.