November 20, 2008
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 1999 Vol. 8 No. 1
Possibilities and Pitfalls
Sidebar for Exploring the Real World Online
As classroom teachers know, lessons taught are not necessarily the same as lessons learned. In educational research, it is well established that learning is more than memorization or the transfer of information; it is a process of making connections between previous knowledge and new experience. Student knowledge and understanding are built, or constructed, from the information presented by teachers and other sources. (See Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, Basic Books, 1991.)
The potential academic impact of online communication among students is illuminated by a recent study of how adolescents from two geographically distant and culturally dissimilar communities in the United States constructed understandings of their online peers: J. H. Gray's 1999 doctoral dissertation at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, “Understanding Online Peers: Sociocultural and Media Processes Among Young Adolescent Students in the United States.”
In a relatively informal 20-week social studies project, the students in Gray's study met their online peers and worked in small cross-site groups to investigate and report on issues in their respective communities, issues such as transportation, school life, and environment. They communicated through home pages, Usenet conferences, and chats on an educationally oriented MUD, a text-based virtual reality system. Student use of each medium showed both pedagogical promise and pedagogical pitfalls.
Home Pages
When looking at online peers' home-page photos, for example, small groups
of students sometimes gathered around a computer screen to “check out”
online peers, focusing on their physical appearance and ignoring their written
descriptions. Student comments based on local norms of attractiveness were
not unusual: “Isn't he so ugly?” or “Laura is not bad.”
However, other students used photographs to identify interpersonal similarities such as gender or intriguing differences. For instance, Lisa, a student from an all-white classroom in a small city set among farmland and wilderness became interested in getting to know Guitele, her “Haitian African American” online partner from a more urban, multiracial and multiethnic city. At first she thought the girl's name was “weird,” but, based on Guitele's home-page photo and text, Lisa decided that she was “cool” and used the other online media to learn more about her. Likewise, many students used autobiographical home-page information to identify similarities between themselves and their online peers.
Conferences
While home pages provided one-way communication, online conferences allowed
the adolescent students in Gray's study to interact directly with their online
peers.
Just as in the classroom, students' interpersonal relations sometimes helped and sometimes hindered academic learning. Friendly conference messages helped online peers get to know each other and become motivated to study their topic.
For example, Laura introduced herself to her online partners with a message that began “Hello Sharmaine and Amy, What's up in Centerton? Down here in Fieldon things are cool” and included observations about the local youth scene (“skateboards are all right but not many people have them anymore”). Later, while chatting online, Laura and Amy became quite enthusiastic about their views on “arts and entertainment,” their group research topic.
By contrast, Wendy and Greg sent their online partner a curt, business-like memo on the conference that began with the phrase “To Ian:” and focused mainly on the academic topic using choppy phrases such as “Weather: Amount of snowfall, rainfall, and average weather” rather than complete sentences. Later online interactions in this group were frustrating for the students and involved several instances of miscommunication.
MUD Chat
With adult facilitation, cross-site student groups used chat for collaborative
decision making. During online chat meetings some student groups dutifully
completed their assignment with only a few non-academic comments, such as
friendly greetings and farewells. Others seemed captivated by their online
social interactions with distant, unseen peers—with various results.
In one especially engaging interaction, three boys completed their online assignment and then were allowed to just “hang” together on the MUD.
Given this freedom, Doug, a student with previous MUD experience, used his technical knowledge to teach Gary how to engage in a mock fight, akin to informal wrestling or karate. However, immediately after Gary learned to use the necessary MUD command (“Gary kick Doug”), he apologized (“Sorry I kicked you, I just wanted to try”) to be sure his new friend did not feel hurt or take offense.
While some of the MUD interactions involved friendly or inquisitive interchanges that seemed to contribute to students' collaborative academic relationships, others included various forms of what Sherry Turkle, in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 1995), refers to as acting out. “In acting out,” Turkle writes (page 200), “we stage our old conflicts in new settings, we reenact our past in fruitless repetition.”
Acting out can cut off interactions. For instance, Shelley, when frustrated with her group's conversation, regularly typed “designs” (^&*^&*^&*^&*^&*) or nonsense words (gooberskotch, hetswerf). Andre would type words in Russian to confuse and annoy his online partners. Sometimes he used his advanced knowledge of the MUD to leave the group conversation without permission and explore the MUD's imaginary world with a classmate logged on from a nearby computer.
The varied online learning experiences of students like Andre, Shelley, Doug, and others show that lessons learned online are influenced by more than on-screen information. Communication media make possible and likely a range of potential online interactions. (See Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer, MIT Press, 1998.) The knowledge and understanding gained by particular students is determined by their online interactions plus many other factors, such as individual learning styles, classroom interactions, and local cultural norms and values.
—James H. Gray
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