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Opinion
Learning in the Webiverse: How Do You Grade a Conversation?
6/18/2008
Web 2.0 Just Does Conversation
Just as we have found that the Web does visualization really well, does reference really well, aggregation really well, and of course computation really well, we find it simulates real-life conversation really well, too. Blogs have become a conversational form, as have e-mail, and chat. All three are natural linguistic genres in that people of all ages choose to use these genres in their leisure time, they serve a social purpose, and they have developed linguistic rules of their own.
How do we know they have rules? Because we know what looks right in each of these forms, and we know what looks weird in each of these forms. We subconsciously know the discourse rules of our new human conversational forms.
That Old Tipping Point
Conversation has always been at the heart of all learning. Print and books, over the past 500 years, made "conversation" extendable in time and space and built the current world. Now, digital capabilities have taken the quotation marks away from the word conversation. In this Web 2.0 era, past the print-digital tipping point, we don't have to pretend to have an academic conversation any more ("I'll write a book, you write a review, we'll talk at a conference, you pass it on to your students, and then you write a book . . ."), we can actually have a real conversation with our students. What Richness!
Trent Batson, Ph.D. has served as an English professor, director of academic computing, and has been an IT leader since the mid-1980s. He is currently Co-Lead for the Web2ePortfolio Initiatve (W2eP), a Senior Associate with the TLT Group, and Editor of Campus Technology's Web 2.0 e-newsletter. batsontr@mit.edu
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