- Email: [email protected]
Beyond chat on the internet
Computers & Education 35 (2000) 21±35
www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu
Beyond chat on the internet Albert L. Ingram*, Lesley G. Hathorn, Alan Evans Kent State University, College of Education, 405 White Hall, Kent, OH 44242, USA Received 11 February 1999; accepted 26 January 2000
Abstract Synchronous Computer Mediated Communications (CMC) are becoming increasingly important to education. Not only do they oer quick access to information over the Internet, but they also ®t well into the current emphasis on collaboration and communications in education in general. The simplest such programs, such as Internet Relay Chat, allow learners to exchange information in real time. Others, such as, MUDs and MOOs, immerse learners into a virtual world, although still entirely textbased. Other synchronous CMC or chat programs include 2D graphical backgrounds, characters associated with each participant, props and costumes for those characters, and other elements that enhance the communications experience. This paper describes the opportunities and pitfalls of using graphical chat programs in education, in addition to ongoing research and development. Some guidelines for using the program in education are derived from both our research and our experience. 7 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Computer-mediated communications; Learning communities; Distributed learning environment
1. Introduction ``Building a community of learners'' (e.g. Rheingold, 1993; Jonassen, 1995) has become a common slogan for those interested in creating new and possibly more eective ways of teaching and learning. One way the Internet can help us achieve that aim is through synchronous communications, in which all parties to the discussion are online simultaneously and communicating in ``real time''. Face-to-face (f2f) communications are synchronous, as are * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-330-672-2294; fax: +1-330-672-2512. E-mail address: [email protected] (A.L. Ingram). 0360-1315/00/$ - see front matter 7 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 3 6 0 - 1 3 1 5 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 1 5 - 4
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telephone conversations. Letters and email messages are asynchronous. The advantages of synchronous communications in many situations are in the immediacy of the communications and the ability to trade ideas and information quickly and without necessarily being locked into a position. Most teachers value the give and take of a good class discussion, something that is dicult to achieve asynchronously. Until very recently, synchronous communications have most often been achieved on the Internet using Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or ICQ programs (Reid, 1991) or text-based MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHs (http://moo.du.org:8000/99anon/anonview). The communications were fast, but the environments were entirely textual, without the graphical and multimedia aspects of most current computing environments. While technologically sophisticated students could master these programs readily, the task was more problematic for people without a background in Unix or DOS, since the services looked so dierent. In addition, it is only in the last few years that the software and networks have become reliable enough to support extended educational conversations. More recent text-based programs include AOL Instant Messenger (http://www.aol.com/aim) and Yahoo Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com). Now, however, programs for synchronous communications have moved beyond text-based chat programs to become rudimentary forms of virtual reality. Variations include both 2D and 3D environments, with characters (often called ``avatars'') representing individuals with varying degrees of ®delity, dialog that appears in bubbles above an avatar's head, programmable multimedia environments, and speech transmission, as well as graphical navigation and manipulation. The potential to create distance learning opportunities in these virtual worlds is immense. Here we review the types of graphical chat programs available with special reference to the use of 2D graphical programs. Our aim is to assist educators in selecting the program appropriate for their applications. The review is followed by a discussion of some current and potential applications in education, along with our experiences so far. In this paper we mention examples of Internet-based chat programs (text, 2D, 3D, and Web-based) available at the time of writing. Since these technologies are changing rapidly, this list cannot be fully up-to-date or comprehensive, and the URLs may have changed.
2. 2D graphical chat programs Unlike IRC, instant messengers, and similar programs, which allow people to communicate with text only, a 2D graphical chat program gives the user a graphical background and other features to enhance the experience. Although most people think of the background as representing a physical space, like a room, it can in fact be anything at all, from real or imagined places to chess boards to a numerical or graphical data set. Depending on how the background is conceived, it can encourage or discourage speci®c types of discussions. Some backgrounds are more social, such as an online ``tavern'', while others may encourage educational interchanges, such as a seminar room. In addition, such a virtual world usually consists of more than one room, and the environment as a whole can be structured and connected such that it becomes a full learning environment of its own. Students navigate around it, from room to room, and if it has been structured well, the navigation becomes part of the educational experience along with the visual backgrounds and the conversations.
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Where a text-based chat program gives a user only the option of choosing an online name, most 2D programs also allow users to represent themselves graphically with an avatar and props or costumes with which to dress it. In addition, some aspects of the graphical interface may partially compensate for the absence of the non-verbal cues we rely on in face-to-face communications. Such compensations are barely possible in text-only chat. At the same time, such an environment can eliminate such social characteristics as race, gender, and status and allow students to concentrate on the experience and the content. The Palace (http://www.thepalace.com/; Barnett & Gray, 1997) is one program that allows Macintosh and PC users to establish 2D multimedia environments in which two or more participants can communicate using typed messages that appear in bubbles over the heads of their avatars. Because of the sound standardization on the Macintosh platform, the dialog also can be spoken in one of several computer voices on those machines. In a 2D chat environment such as The Palace the user can move readily from one room to another, while having the feeling of being in control of her/his location and setting. In this sense, these programs are similar to MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHs, which are text-based virtual spaces. A variety of educators (e.g. Furst-Bowe, 1996)) have been experimenting with using these environments for education, problem solving and other activities. In a problem solving experience the user will not be given all the information he/she needs immediately but instead may have to search for it, interacting with others along the way. This may make the task a more real-world experience and extend the learning beyond merely ®nding the ``correct'' answer. The graphical environment of 2D graphical programs may allow a richer experience to develop for each learner, where the learner is immersed in the problem to be solved. The basic Palace avatar is a smiley face which can be customized with a photo, caricature, or other representation, real or imagined. A customizable gallery of props allows users to add elements to the environment and manipulate the items in the shared environment. A chess board environment is a good example; in this case, the board can be programmed to set up a new game with a mouse click, and the pieces are props that can be moved around by the players as the game progresses. A scripting language also allows the server owner to post text messages as new users log on, deliver predetermined responses to words entered by users, have rooms, animations, or props that respond to user words, and many other things. Individual users can even write scripts to customize their characters. Other features of 2D graphical environments often include a drawing capability, the capacity for leaving props in a room and manipulating them with scripts, and popup dialogs presented by yet other scripts. The Palace drawing tools are quite crude at this time, but can be used to leave messages and as a simple whiteboard feature that enhances communications. The ability to leave props in a room means that one can use them to leave messages for other visitors. In addition, with scripts, a hidden room can be used as a prop repository and used to set up a public room in advance of a discussion, by clearing out old props and copying needed ones to it. Then a new group can pick up the props and use them for the role play or other activity planned for the area. The ability to script a room to present messages upon a mouse click or the utterance of a key word or phrase is a good way to give visitors instructions or information. 2D graphical chat environments can run quite eciently from low-powered servers over relatively low bandwidth connections. Speci®c backgrounds need to be downloaded to the
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user's machine only once. From then on, only the text messages and prop changes are sent through the server, minimizing the required bandwidth and server capabilities required. In The Palace one site can link to another, allowing a distributed architecture like the Web. World Wide Web (http) links can be embedded in Palace sites, and Web sites can contain Palace addresses, allowing easy movement back and forth between the two environments. Other 2D graphical chat programs have similar capabilities. Thus, the two technologies Ð Web and chat Ð can be designed to work together, each contributing what it is best at. Learning to use these programs is quite easy for most people. Often the most dicult part is simply installing it and getting online the ®rst time. After one learns to enter a new address (which is likely to be similar to a Web address but which may require a port number), all that is required is pointing and clicking and typing. People learn within minutes how to move around a room, how to move from room to room, how to converse, and how to don costumes and props. Once these basic skills are acquired, users may take a little longer to learn the nuances of the environment. More important, people seem to need time simply to explore and fool around as well as to learn some reasonable conventions or ``netiquette'' for chat rooms. This takes longer than learning to use the software itself. We have been working primarily with The Palace, although there are several other 2D chat programs available. Examples are Virtual Places (http://www.virtualplaces.net), which operates over the Web, V-Chat (http://chat.msn.com), and PowWow (http://www.tribal.com/powwow). They each handle communications, graphical backgrounds, and other things slightly dierently, and they also require the user to have special client software beyond a basic Web browser or communications program. Virtual Places, for example, depends on programs downloaded with a Web page. The Web page itself provides the background, while the Virtual Places software adds the avatars and chat capabilities.
3. Three-dimensional chat programs An alternative to 2D chat programs is a 3D graphical chat program. They can heighten the perception that users have of actually traveling through a space, because they use virtual reality techniques to create a 3D world. Instead of just having a graphical background to their discussions and conversations, users now are immersed in a world where they can interact with others, who are again represented by avatars. Users can move around in three dimensions, which makes navigation more complex. These 3D worlds can again be almost anything that the developer can conceive of, from realistic depictions of actual environments to highly imaginative fantasy worlds. For educational uses, the type of envinment should be chosen carefully to support the kinds of interactions and discussions desired. The increased verisimilitude of a 3D chat program comes at a price, both in the computing and communications resources required and in the cognitive processing demanded of the user. Most 3D programs are based on Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), which must be served up by a powerful server over higher bandwidth communications lines. Unlike the 2D programs, the rooms and spaces of 3D programs are not usually stored on the user's hard disk, which means that they must be downloaded anew every time one visits. Finally, in order
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to run a VRML script, the user's client machine must also be a fairly capable one. These problems are quickly becoming moot as hardware capabilities and bandwidth increase. When one enters a 3D chat space, the cognitive processing demands also appear to be higher than in the 2D rooms. The dierence can be summarized as the distinction between a ®rstperson view with a 3D program and a third-person view with a 2D program. A 2D room provides a potentially useful graphical background to the discussion, but there is only a small opportunity to navigate around it. One looks at the room (including one's own avatar) as an outsider would, all participants are visible all the time, and, unless one participant chooses to ``whisper'' to another, all conversations are also public. In a 3D room, however, you participate directly in the scene, from the point of view of your avatar. Therefore, you have the problem of having to face in one direction or another, thereby allowing you to see only some of the individuals who may be in that space with you. What happens if you talk to someone who is not facing you? What if two people are talking behind you? What are the conventions for which conversations you participate in and which you don't? It can get confusing. The market for 3D chat programs is changing rapidly as dierent technologies are developed and tried out. As a result, companies are appearing, merging, and disappearing quickly. As of this writing, some of the available 3D programs include Blaxxun (http://www.blaxxun.com) and ActiveWorlds (http://www.activeworlds.com). As noted, more powerful hardware, higher bandwidth communications, and newer software may soon alleviate some of the current drawbacks to 3D graphical chat programs. 4. Educational applications Increasingly, the preferred instructional strategies for a variety of goals, objectives, and learners stress active collaborative learning, with extensive communications among learners while solving problems, producing reports, or otherwise engaging in real-world tasks. The learners are usually all located in the same place, but there is no necessary instructional reason that they cannot be distributed widely. In fact, there might be substantial educational bene®ts to bringing together widely diverse points of view. With Internet-based synchronous communications it is becoming simple and inexpensive to create learning groups that collaborate from a variety of locations around the country or the world. How might these groups work? We have begun experimenting with a variety of ways of using 2D graphical chat in educational settings. Some of the uses we are examining include initiatives in several areas. 4.1. Distance education In our academic environment, with graduate students whose classes normally meet one day a week, we are ®nding synchronous online discussions a useful way to either extend the classroom hours so that educationally valuable conversations can be continued between class meetings or even to replace many classes altogether (McCollum, 1997). Students often seem to appreciate the ability to interact with each other outside of and even instead of in the classroom. The authors have used chat in many classes, but most especially in ``Instructional
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Applications of the Internet'', which is now being conducted almost entirely on the Internet. Regular online discussion is an integral part of the course for classes and group discussions and collaboration. 4.2. Virtual problem solving groups There are at least two ways that graphical synchronous discussion software can facilitate virtual or distributed problem solving groups. One is as a communications medium within a larger instructional context. The other is as the problem solving environment itself. In the ®rst instance, students from a variety of locations are all given a problem to solve as a group. The chat software serves as the medium for those students to discuss the problem, divide up the work, meet, try out solutions, and so on. The room they meet in may simply resemble a comfortable, inviting place to talk. A group of seventh graders from a local middle school has set up a series of rooms to support their ongoing Future Problem Solving activities. The activities are the same ones they have been doing in small, in-person groups anyway. Such software adds the ability to convene groups from a wide area, potentially increasing the variety of the points of view in the groups and adding to the problem solving experience. We are now expanding our reach beyond the local schools to bringing distant problem solvers into the fold. In the second instance, the chat room (or more likely rooms) becomes the problem solving environment and actually adds information, tasks, and other elements to the situation. An example is the Weather Problem Solver we developed for elementary school children. Through extensive scripting, the series of rooms is set up so that problem solving is possible only in groups of three. When a group forms, the students enter the problem solving area, where they are given the weather forecasting task. In the next room, they split up to gather information about humidity, barometric pressure, and cloud formations and the relationships of each to weather forecasting. These rooms present a series of examples to those who visit, thus demanding that students work out some principles of weather forecasting themselves. When they have accumulated as much information as they can, the students gather in a group problem solving room, where they are asked to predict a day's weather from a set of data. This environment encourages both individual problem solving (in generating the principles that relate humidity, pressure, and clouds to weather conditions) and group problem solving (in forecasting weather from all three variables, each of which is understood by only one participant). The chat software in this case not only facilitates group work, it becomes the problem solving environment itself. 4.3. Community problem solving activities It is possible for schoolchildren to communicate with more than just other schoolchildren. For example, children could go online with experts in various ®elds, community leaders, and others. As an example of this we are currently working with a gifted/talented class in a local school district on a ``community problem solving'' project. The children are concerned with the health and viability of the Cuyahoga River in Northeast Ohio. To work on the problems associated with the river, they have created a set of chat rooms that they hope will facilitate problem solving processes. A grant from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources allowed
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them to buy enough registered copies of the client software to distribute to scientists and community leaders as well as to other children. They are using their online time to discuss problems and solutions for the Cuyahoga. 4.4. Historic recreations The graphical, partly VR quality of 2D chat software allows the possibility of creating environments that re-create historical or other sites. With photographs or graphics, the environments can look extremely realistic. Although virtual tours of current or historical places are already available on the World Wide Web (e.g. Colonial Williamsburg at http:// www.history.org), graphical chat software adds another dimension. In such a site, there can be online tour guides who take you around the site (if that is what you want), pointing out features of interest and explaining the historical background. You can also meet others who are visiting the site and ®nd out why they are there, where they are from, and what they know about it. Some sites, like the Battle of the Little Bighorn, could result in extremely active discussions and arguments among the proponents of various views. Other issues are of global importance, such as the environment, and a good chat site devoted to them might attract an equally global audience (McMahen & Dawson, 1995). 4.5. Exploration of cultural dierences Educators stress ``diversity'' these days, but it is often dicult for schools to ®nd opportunities for children from genuinely dierent cultures to interact and learn from one another. Usually, the school population is drawn from a limited geographical area, with familiar groups and individuals within it. Chat software oers an opportunity to bring people together to talk without having to bring them together physically. We would like to see palaces developed that re¯ect a particular local culture. They would need to be advertised to attract students from all over and staed by students from the local culture. The local students would be there to explain the signi®cance of the environment, answer questions about the site, and ask questions in turn. This could allow students the opportunity to practice role playing as they enter into dierent cultures and try to experience them from the inside. If the other people in a chat room treat the student as an actual representative of the culture, he or she might be able to experience a little better what it is like. CyberPalace (palace://castle.about.or.jp:9998/) represents one example of this possibility, with beautiful graphics of Japan and some opportunity to converse with others in Japanese. However, it concentrates more on using the software to present a kind of slide show, with surprisingly little real interactivity. Therefore, it also serves as a reminder that the real strength of chat programs is as an environment for conversation. 4.6. Language skill development A key to learning another language is being able to practice the skills. This can be dicult if the only other people you know who speak it are those in your class who are also struggling to learn. Again, 2D chat environment oers a means to circumvent this limitation. In a chat
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program you have to be quick with the keyboard and concentrate on communicating eectively rather than just on getting the right answer. In general, participation in second language learning can increase when using synchronous CMC. Learners have the opportunity to correct mistakes without interrupting the ¯ow of the conversation. Lack of ¯uency with the language is not as evident as with f2f communications, and the need for explicit turn taking may be reduced (Kelm, 1992). In a related study, we are currently exploring the use of chat to help deaf students learn written English. It is commonplace that in order to learn a language, you have to converse in it. Deaf students readily learn American Sign Language (ASL) in this way, but ASL does not transfer directly to written English, which is a separate language and a separate learning issue for these students. We are using chat software to provide a conversational environment in which deaf students can converse in written English and thereby increase their skills. 4.7. Counseling Chat rooms and sites can be restricted to allow only certain people to enter, or the occupants of a chat ``room'' can often choose to lock the door behind them for a private conversation. This makes it possible to conduct very personal, sensitive discussions with individuals or groups. One place where this ability is important is in counseling students. Young people today have many con®dential topics that they might want to discuss with an understanding adult. However, it is often dicult to do so in person. Chat programs oer a potentially anonymous forum where youngsters can discuss subjects like sex, drugs, or AIDS in privacy and safety. We ran a four-week support group for graduate students using 2D graphical chat, with interesting results and implications for both communications and counseling (Page et al., in press). 4.8. Student±teacher interactions For graduate students and others who do not see their instructors often (once a week or sometimes less), getting the personal information and guidance essential for good education is often dicult. It can be too time-consuming to drive for 45 min for a 10 min consultation during oce hours, and frustrating to play telephone tag. Online oce hours using synchronous communications can be one solution. So far, our experience has been that oce hours using chat are a tough sell, however. Those who use it like it, but most students cannot or will not install the software and go online at speci®ed times just for this purpose. Perhaps developing 2D discussion environments as solutions in other areas ®rst will lead to increased use for the mundane task of talking with an instructor during oce hours. 4.9. Student±student communications Increasingly students are being expected to communicate with other students about the courses they take and the subjects they study. Collaborative learning has become an important component of education at all levels, and the teacher, in many cases, is becoming more a facilitator than the sole director of the educational experience. While
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many situations permit frequent contact among students, others do not. Again, graduate students who meet once a week may ®nd it dicult to get to know one another, let alone continue meaningful educational conversations outside of class. Some college students and a wide variety of other adult learners and trainees may be in similar situations. Once again, both synchronous and asynchronous Internet-based communications may provide a way around this problem. KidsNation (palace://kidsnation.com), a 2D graphical chat environment designed and maintained for children, illustrates some of the possibility of communications primarily among students below college level. It provides brightly colored graphics, lots of action, the chance to converse with other children from all over, and a safe online environment. Adult ``wizards'' patrol the environment to ensure that children both behave themselves and are not harassed. In addition, KidsNation includes links to the Web, oering children a place to post their stories, poems, and artwork. One of the authors (Ingram) teaches a course almost entirely on the Internet. Once the technical problems are resolved at the beginning of a semester, students seem happy to meet online. Graphical chat is an integral part of this course, since the class meets as a whole every week or two using that software. More important, after a few weeks students begin to feel the need for more direct interaction with one another, and they schedule small group discussions in the environment themselves. Some of these are more technically sophisticated students, so that is probably a factor. Others, however, are students who start out very anxious and uncertain about the technology but quickly come to enjoy it and understand its power. Eventually, we have found, students engage in complex discussions online with little or no intervention from the instructor and even organize virtual ®eld trips to sites elsewhere, like Japan. We can envision this environment being used for student-to-student communications in several ways. First, there is simply the possibility of continuing useful educational discussions outside the classroom. For motivated students this can be the best way to try out their ideas on each other, defend them against criticism, and come to a common understanding of key concepts. Second, it is possible to provide assignments that require collaborative learning and problem solving. When students are dispersed geographically (at least between class meetings), synchronous communications media allow better collaboration than many other possibilities. Finally, although we personally haven't tried this yet, we can see graphical chat environments providing students an opportunity for educational role playing in which they interact with one another as other personae. For example, a chat area could be set up that reproduces the look of Independence Hall and parts of Philadelphia in the late 18th century. With props representing common clothing of the time, students could take dierent roles based on the Continental Congress and/or the Constitutional Convention to see where the arguments took them. The ideas presented here do not constitute a complete list of the potential uses of graphical chat programs. Students themselves often ®nd new uses for the technology, such as the graduate students with children who use it during computer classes to keep in touch with home. Others use it for discussions and exchanging information with drawing and props. Teachers, too, can ®nd alternative uses over time.
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5. Future directions of research and practice A key problem we have encountered in using online chat, even with advanced graduate students, has been moving people from seeing the program as an essentially social environment to seeing and using it as an educational tool. Anyone who has used chat programs before has probably done so in a social, free-form context. Those who are inexperienced with chat quickly pick up on the opportunities for social interaction that are presented. In an educational context the issue then becomes how to get people to focus on meaningful tasks and discussions. We have begun to research this process. Since many chat environments, from MUDs to The Palace and beyond, originated as social, game-playing programs, it is not surprising that it encourages that kind of behavior. The anonymity that is possible in most synchronous CMC environments also contributes to the development of dierent codes of conduct online. Graphical chat environments may oer an advantage over others for education, however. Text-based chat programs are essentially devoid of social and physical context, so behavior may be especially uninhibited. Hostility is openly expressed in such situations as well as other possibly inappropriate emotions. (The situation may be even worse in asynchronous communications.) The purely text-based nature of the communications forces people to ®nd ways to express things that might ordinarily be communicated with facial expressions and body language. These strategies include the use of ``emoticons'', changing the use of language, and using commonly accepted abbreviations like LOL (for ``Laughing Out Loud''). Graphical programs oer other ways to express these kinds of emotional and social messages and so may allow people to concentrate more on the content of what they are saying; it replaces some of the non-verbal cues lost in text-only chats. Many variables appear to aect the quality of educational discussions using synchronous computer-mediated communications. These include variables associated with the learners, variables associated with the technical environment, and variables associated with the educational and social environment. Examples of learner variables include age and educational level, familiarity with computers and the Internet, typing skills, motivation for participating in a given discussion, as well as many others. The technical environment includes such variables as the speed and reliability of the connections, the nature of the graphical rooms and avatars used by participants, and many others. Finally, the educational and social environment encompasses such things as the tasks given the students to complete, the rules that govern the conversations, the sources of those rules, the familiarity of the participants with one another (for example, do they know one another or not?), the size of the discussion groups, and the distances over which the chat is taking place. 5.1. The environment If the graphical backgrounds of and relationships among the rooms weren't at least potentially important, then there wouldn't be any point to using a graphical chat room environment. The question is how to make good use of this extra dimension over purely textbased programs. Clearly, the answer depends on the goals of the environment, the learners, and other factors. Georgia Institute of Technology (http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/techlinc/) has
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created a virtual classroom where faculty hold oce hours and students can collaborate on projects. One room, The Web Resource Room, has the appearance of a library, but is linked to various Web sites and search engines. Syracuse University customized The Palace to create the award winning AskERIC virtual classroom. Designed for ease of use, but with the look and feel of an authentic classroom, it includes extra navigation devices, a map, and a white board. There is even a button for raising a hand. 5.2. The task The ®rst element to consider is the task that is set for the learners (or that they set for themselves). As with in-person discussions, it is rarely sucient to simply ask a group of people to ``discuss this topic''. What does that mean? What level of discussion is requested? What should be the result of the discussion? Unless we provide answers to these questions to the learners, almost any discussion they have will ®t the criteria. A clear task with some product expected at the end of the discussion goes a long way towards helping groups concentrate and towards making them accountable for their discussions. The product could be as simple as a summary of the discussion or something more elaborate like the solution to a problem or a Web page. For example, an eective discussion topic in the course on Instructional Applications of the Internet taught by the ®rst author is ``Acceptable Use Policies''. The task is to produce a list of the major points that must be written into such a policy for a school or district. The discussion is integrated into the course framework as a whole, and the results do aect students'' grades. This is in accordance with other research showing the need for such an incentive (Velayo, 1994). The second important point about the task is that synchronous communications do not lend themselves to all types of discussions equally. The environment, graphical or not, encourages quick interactions, fast responses, and, often, little re¯ective thought. The need for fast typing also may interfere with students' abilities to concentrate and re¯ect on the topics at hand. Dierences in typing speed may result in large dierences in participation in the conversations. Discussions that require background research and careful re¯ection are more appropriate for asynchronous online discussions. One saving feature of many online chats is the ability to record all the incoming text so that one can return to it later. This can encourage re¯ection, especially after a fast and furious discussion is over. Chat environments are good for discussions that build on the strengths of the medium: brainstorming, some kinds of problem solving, and similar tasks. 5.3. Rules Next, a set of rules is useful for controlling and directing a chat-based discussion. Often, learners will buy into the rules better if they have had a hand in developing them. The rules may range from simple social norms Ð no ``¯aming'' or obnoxious behavior Ð to speci®c procedures for deciding who ``has the ¯oor'' and consequently the right to speak. For example, in the counseling study mentioned earlier, the students had a prop in the form of a Prozac2 pill. When someone wanted to talk he or she moved the pill to his or her avatar. When the comment was complete, he or she moved the prop back to a neutral part of the room. This
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facilitated keeping the discussion focused, without the problem of going in a myriad of dierent directions. The participants eventually felt comfortable enough to interject short ontask comments without the prop, but generally respected the self-imposed rule for longer comments.
5.4. Group size Synchronous discussions usually work best with small groups of three to ®ve people. Any larger than that and the rooms tend to divide into separate discussion groups anyway, although membership might shift back and forth. Very large groups are essentially unmanageable, except by using elements of the software that can make chat programs into presentation media: one person lecturing to a group online. To us, this defeats the primary purposes behind using chat, which is interaction.
5.5. Identity It is possible to disguise one's identity completely in most chat programs. By using misleading costumes and props and a ®ctitious name, one can hide one's true identity pretty successfully, unless there are clues in the statements one types and sends. However, we consider this undesirable in an educational context. One part of productive educational discussions is taking responsibility for what one says. The anonymity possible in most chat environments can defeat that requirement, so we recommend that students use their own names and not try either to be anonymous or to actively mislead the group about their identities. Communication will be easier to sustain, and an individual's behavior is likely to be more predictable and more on-task. One way to enhance this eect is to have people use small photographs of themselves as props. This makes it even more like an in-person discussion. What might be lost here are greater creativity and willingness to take risks with ideas if one is anonymous (Ahern & Durrington, 1996; Olaniran, 1994).
5.6. Moderation One question that must be faced in setting up and running synchronous discussions is whether it is necessary or desirable to have a moderator Ð someone to lead the discussion, keep it on track, and so forth. Velayo (1994) suggests that a moderator is desirable, but that it is also necessary for any moderator to be ¯exible, since it is impossible to predict the course of the discussion. Some factors that might aect the need for a moderator include the size of the group, the level of the participants (in our experience middle schoolers may be more likely to need ®rm moderation than graduate students, but not always!), the engaging nature of the task, and even the speci®c individuals in the group. Berge (1996) discusses how best to moderate or facilitate on online discussion.
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6. Disadvantages of synchronous communications Synchronous chat is not necessarily an unmitigated good as a communications medium for education, of course. There are signi®cant drawbacks that aect how and where it can be used eectively. We have already mentioned the fact that it does not always lend itself to deep re¯ective conversations. Although factors like the type of task given and the skill of the online moderator may alleviate this problem, the fact remains that synchronous conversations place a premium on quick thinking and fast typing over careful thought. In addition, and probably even more so than in f2f discussions, many of the comments made in chat rooms are trivial and do not contribute to the discussion, at least not directly. At the same time, such seemingly o-task comments may be important to establishing the social dimension of the chat adequately. Conversely, it also appears to be true that participants in synchronous discussions can become overloaded with information. This may be another good argument for keeping the groups small. It also may indicate a frequent need for skillful moderation in an online discussion.
7. Evaluating synchronous discussions While one might not want to grade students on the quality of their online discussions (although a grade might be appropriate for the products of such discussions), one might still want to assess the discussions for clues about how they went, how helpful they were, and how to improve them in the future. The primary source of data for such evalutions is the logs kept by the programs. Chat users can usually choose to record any and all conversations on her/his own computer. If an instructor is serving as moderator or facilitator for a discussion, for example, he/she could log everything that is said in the room for review later. These logs could even be distributed to students for them to re¯ect on after the discussion is over. Often the chat server can also be set up to log all discussions. This record contains even more information, such as the time that each comment was received by the server. This can be a valuable information for researchers and teachers. However, if numerous conversations are taking place in dierent rooms, it can be dicult to sort out the individual threads. The key to the eective use of chat logs for studying the course of online discussions is the use of adequate coding schemes for the logs. One student (Proudfoot, 1996) used a graphing technique to chart the course of a discussion. This involved using dierently shaped nodes to represent the types of comments Ð questions, responses, o-task, and so forth Ð and connectors to trace the ¯ow of the conversation. This method showed a clear dierence in the charts generated for a well-moderated and a poorly-moderated discussion: a poorly moderated discussion had few interconnections and many dead ends; a well-moderated discussion was far more interconnected. In other studies we are coding the logs to measure the amount of actual collaboration that takes place. Wild & Braid (1997) propose a coding scheme for children's interactions in groups which may also apply to online discussions. Such a taxonomy divides comments into clear categories of on-task and o-task behavior.
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8. Conclusions As computer networks and the Internet become more widespread, educators are looking for applications that enhance their educational eectiveness. In spite of an initial visceral reaction against synchronous communications in the form of chat rooms because of their reputation, educators can and should ®nd valuable ways of using programs like this. To the extent that communicating with other people is a central part of education, computer-mediated communications can help improve education by extending the range of the discussions, increasing the numbers and diversity of the people involved, and improving the continuity over time of the communities created. We have found that graphical chat programs can be used eectively to hold discussions with students over a distance, to bring together people who may not otherwise communicate, and to create environments that encourage role playing, conversation, and collaboration. At the same time, it is clear that in most circumstances synchronous CMC is only one of the ways of using the Internet for instructional purposes. Chat technology is good for some kinds of discussions. For others, asynchronous communications might be more eective, and the World Wide Web is still the premier medium for disseminating information. Like most educational technologies, graphical chat programs can be used eectively or ineectively. When using synchronous CMC, one must take care to use tasks, group sizes, moderating techniques, and other variables that increase the probability that the resulting discussions will have educational value. Merely instructing students to discuss a topic is likely to result in short super®cial conversations with little educational value. However, good tasks supported by meaningful graphical environments and avatars can be highly eective. Similarly, groups of the right size that follow some simple discussion rules can produce good results. In spite of the increasing numbers of trials, demonstration projects, and even research studies, however, we are still very early in the process of ®nding out how best to use this medium in instruction. Which is ``best:'' text, 2D graphics, or 3D graphics? What tasks do we set, and what do learners gain from them? How do learning outcomes compare between online and f2f discussions? What eects do graphical rooms and props add to the mix? We have many questions and only a relatively few answers. One thing is clear: synchronous CMC can have a positive eect on what we do in education. References Ahern, T. C., & Durrington, V. (1996). Eects of anonymity and group saliency on participation and interaction in a computer-mediated small-group discussion. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 28(2), 133±147. Barnett, J., & Gray, D. (1997). Ocial palace tour guide. Research Triangle Park, NC: Ventana Communications Group. Berge, Z. (1996). The role of the online instructor/facilitator. [Online] Available: http://www.emoderators.com/ moderators/teach_online.html. Furst-Bowe, J. (1996). MOOs for teaching and learning. Techtrends, 41, 3±5. Jonassen, D. H. (1995). Supporting communities of learners with technology: a vision for integrating technology with learning in schools. Educational Technology, 35(4), 60±63. Kelm, O. R. (1992). The use of synchronous computer networks in second language instruction: A Preliminary Report. Foreign Language Annals, 25(5), 441±454.
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McCollum, K. (1997). Two universities put a chat-room program to an academic purpose. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 44. McMahen, C., & Dawson, A. J. (1995). The design and implementation of environmental computer-mediated communication (cmc) projects. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 27(3), 318±335. Olaniran, B. A. (1994). Group performance in computer-mediated and face-to-face communication media. Management Communication Quarterly, 7(3), 256±281. Page, B. J., Delmonico, D. L., Walsh, J., L'Amoreaux, N. A., Danninhirsh, C., Thompson, R. S., Ingram, A. L., & Evans, A. D. (in press). Setting up on-line support groups using the palace software. Journal for Specialists in Group Work. Proudfoot, J. (1996). Personal communication. Reid, E. M. Electropolis: communication and community on internet relay chat. [Online] Available: http:// people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html. Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison± Wesley. Velayo, R. S. (1994). Supplementary classroom instruction via computer conferencing. Educational Technology, 34(3), 20±26. Wild, M., & Braid, P. (1997). A model for measuring children's interactions in small groups using computers. Journal of Computing in Childhood Education, 8(2/3), 215±225.
www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu
Beyond chat on the internet Albert L. Ingram*, Lesley G. Hathorn, Alan Evans Kent State University, College of Education, 405 White Hall, Kent, OH 44242, USA Received 11 February 1999; accepted 26 January 2000
Abstract Synchronous Computer Mediated Communications (CMC) are becoming increasingly important to education. Not only do they oer quick access to information over the Internet, but they also ®t well into the current emphasis on collaboration and communications in education in general. The simplest such programs, such as Internet Relay Chat, allow learners to exchange information in real time. Others, such as, MUDs and MOOs, immerse learners into a virtual world, although still entirely textbased. Other synchronous CMC or chat programs include 2D graphical backgrounds, characters associated with each participant, props and costumes for those characters, and other elements that enhance the communications experience. This paper describes the opportunities and pitfalls of using graphical chat programs in education, in addition to ongoing research and development. Some guidelines for using the program in education are derived from both our research and our experience. 7 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Computer-mediated communications; Learning communities; Distributed learning environment
1. Introduction ``Building a community of learners'' (e.g. Rheingold, 1993; Jonassen, 1995) has become a common slogan for those interested in creating new and possibly more eective ways of teaching and learning. One way the Internet can help us achieve that aim is through synchronous communications, in which all parties to the discussion are online simultaneously and communicating in ``real time''. Face-to-face (f2f) communications are synchronous, as are * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-330-672-2294; fax: +1-330-672-2512. E-mail address: [email protected] (A.L. Ingram). 0360-1315/00/$ - see front matter 7 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 3 6 0 - 1 3 1 5 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 1 5 - 4
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telephone conversations. Letters and email messages are asynchronous. The advantages of synchronous communications in many situations are in the immediacy of the communications and the ability to trade ideas and information quickly and without necessarily being locked into a position. Most teachers value the give and take of a good class discussion, something that is dicult to achieve asynchronously. Until very recently, synchronous communications have most often been achieved on the Internet using Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or ICQ programs (Reid, 1991) or text-based MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHs (http://moo.du.org:8000/99anon/anonview). The communications were fast, but the environments were entirely textual, without the graphical and multimedia aspects of most current computing environments. While technologically sophisticated students could master these programs readily, the task was more problematic for people without a background in Unix or DOS, since the services looked so dierent. In addition, it is only in the last few years that the software and networks have become reliable enough to support extended educational conversations. More recent text-based programs include AOL Instant Messenger (http://www.aol.com/aim) and Yahoo Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com). Now, however, programs for synchronous communications have moved beyond text-based chat programs to become rudimentary forms of virtual reality. Variations include both 2D and 3D environments, with characters (often called ``avatars'') representing individuals with varying degrees of ®delity, dialog that appears in bubbles above an avatar's head, programmable multimedia environments, and speech transmission, as well as graphical navigation and manipulation. The potential to create distance learning opportunities in these virtual worlds is immense. Here we review the types of graphical chat programs available with special reference to the use of 2D graphical programs. Our aim is to assist educators in selecting the program appropriate for their applications. The review is followed by a discussion of some current and potential applications in education, along with our experiences so far. In this paper we mention examples of Internet-based chat programs (text, 2D, 3D, and Web-based) available at the time of writing. Since these technologies are changing rapidly, this list cannot be fully up-to-date or comprehensive, and the URLs may have changed.
2. 2D graphical chat programs Unlike IRC, instant messengers, and similar programs, which allow people to communicate with text only, a 2D graphical chat program gives the user a graphical background and other features to enhance the experience. Although most people think of the background as representing a physical space, like a room, it can in fact be anything at all, from real or imagined places to chess boards to a numerical or graphical data set. Depending on how the background is conceived, it can encourage or discourage speci®c types of discussions. Some backgrounds are more social, such as an online ``tavern'', while others may encourage educational interchanges, such as a seminar room. In addition, such a virtual world usually consists of more than one room, and the environment as a whole can be structured and connected such that it becomes a full learning environment of its own. Students navigate around it, from room to room, and if it has been structured well, the navigation becomes part of the educational experience along with the visual backgrounds and the conversations.
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Where a text-based chat program gives a user only the option of choosing an online name, most 2D programs also allow users to represent themselves graphically with an avatar and props or costumes with which to dress it. In addition, some aspects of the graphical interface may partially compensate for the absence of the non-verbal cues we rely on in face-to-face communications. Such compensations are barely possible in text-only chat. At the same time, such an environment can eliminate such social characteristics as race, gender, and status and allow students to concentrate on the experience and the content. The Palace (http://www.thepalace.com/; Barnett & Gray, 1997) is one program that allows Macintosh and PC users to establish 2D multimedia environments in which two or more participants can communicate using typed messages that appear in bubbles over the heads of their avatars. Because of the sound standardization on the Macintosh platform, the dialog also can be spoken in one of several computer voices on those machines. In a 2D chat environment such as The Palace the user can move readily from one room to another, while having the feeling of being in control of her/his location and setting. In this sense, these programs are similar to MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHs, which are text-based virtual spaces. A variety of educators (e.g. Furst-Bowe, 1996)) have been experimenting with using these environments for education, problem solving and other activities. In a problem solving experience the user will not be given all the information he/she needs immediately but instead may have to search for it, interacting with others along the way. This may make the task a more real-world experience and extend the learning beyond merely ®nding the ``correct'' answer. The graphical environment of 2D graphical programs may allow a richer experience to develop for each learner, where the learner is immersed in the problem to be solved. The basic Palace avatar is a smiley face which can be customized with a photo, caricature, or other representation, real or imagined. A customizable gallery of props allows users to add elements to the environment and manipulate the items in the shared environment. A chess board environment is a good example; in this case, the board can be programmed to set up a new game with a mouse click, and the pieces are props that can be moved around by the players as the game progresses. A scripting language also allows the server owner to post text messages as new users log on, deliver predetermined responses to words entered by users, have rooms, animations, or props that respond to user words, and many other things. Individual users can even write scripts to customize their characters. Other features of 2D graphical environments often include a drawing capability, the capacity for leaving props in a room and manipulating them with scripts, and popup dialogs presented by yet other scripts. The Palace drawing tools are quite crude at this time, but can be used to leave messages and as a simple whiteboard feature that enhances communications. The ability to leave props in a room means that one can use them to leave messages for other visitors. In addition, with scripts, a hidden room can be used as a prop repository and used to set up a public room in advance of a discussion, by clearing out old props and copying needed ones to it. Then a new group can pick up the props and use them for the role play or other activity planned for the area. The ability to script a room to present messages upon a mouse click or the utterance of a key word or phrase is a good way to give visitors instructions or information. 2D graphical chat environments can run quite eciently from low-powered servers over relatively low bandwidth connections. Speci®c backgrounds need to be downloaded to the
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user's machine only once. From then on, only the text messages and prop changes are sent through the server, minimizing the required bandwidth and server capabilities required. In The Palace one site can link to another, allowing a distributed architecture like the Web. World Wide Web (http) links can be embedded in Palace sites, and Web sites can contain Palace addresses, allowing easy movement back and forth between the two environments. Other 2D graphical chat programs have similar capabilities. Thus, the two technologies Ð Web and chat Ð can be designed to work together, each contributing what it is best at. Learning to use these programs is quite easy for most people. Often the most dicult part is simply installing it and getting online the ®rst time. After one learns to enter a new address (which is likely to be similar to a Web address but which may require a port number), all that is required is pointing and clicking and typing. People learn within minutes how to move around a room, how to move from room to room, how to converse, and how to don costumes and props. Once these basic skills are acquired, users may take a little longer to learn the nuances of the environment. More important, people seem to need time simply to explore and fool around as well as to learn some reasonable conventions or ``netiquette'' for chat rooms. This takes longer than learning to use the software itself. We have been working primarily with The Palace, although there are several other 2D chat programs available. Examples are Virtual Places (http://www.virtualplaces.net), which operates over the Web, V-Chat (http://chat.msn.com), and PowWow (http://www.tribal.com/powwow). They each handle communications, graphical backgrounds, and other things slightly dierently, and they also require the user to have special client software beyond a basic Web browser or communications program. Virtual Places, for example, depends on programs downloaded with a Web page. The Web page itself provides the background, while the Virtual Places software adds the avatars and chat capabilities.
3. Three-dimensional chat programs An alternative to 2D chat programs is a 3D graphical chat program. They can heighten the perception that users have of actually traveling through a space, because they use virtual reality techniques to create a 3D world. Instead of just having a graphical background to their discussions and conversations, users now are immersed in a world where they can interact with others, who are again represented by avatars. Users can move around in three dimensions, which makes navigation more complex. These 3D worlds can again be almost anything that the developer can conceive of, from realistic depictions of actual environments to highly imaginative fantasy worlds. For educational uses, the type of envinment should be chosen carefully to support the kinds of interactions and discussions desired. The increased verisimilitude of a 3D chat program comes at a price, both in the computing and communications resources required and in the cognitive processing demanded of the user. Most 3D programs are based on Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), which must be served up by a powerful server over higher bandwidth communications lines. Unlike the 2D programs, the rooms and spaces of 3D programs are not usually stored on the user's hard disk, which means that they must be downloaded anew every time one visits. Finally, in order
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to run a VRML script, the user's client machine must also be a fairly capable one. These problems are quickly becoming moot as hardware capabilities and bandwidth increase. When one enters a 3D chat space, the cognitive processing demands also appear to be higher than in the 2D rooms. The dierence can be summarized as the distinction between a ®rstperson view with a 3D program and a third-person view with a 2D program. A 2D room provides a potentially useful graphical background to the discussion, but there is only a small opportunity to navigate around it. One looks at the room (including one's own avatar) as an outsider would, all participants are visible all the time, and, unless one participant chooses to ``whisper'' to another, all conversations are also public. In a 3D room, however, you participate directly in the scene, from the point of view of your avatar. Therefore, you have the problem of having to face in one direction or another, thereby allowing you to see only some of the individuals who may be in that space with you. What happens if you talk to someone who is not facing you? What if two people are talking behind you? What are the conventions for which conversations you participate in and which you don't? It can get confusing. The market for 3D chat programs is changing rapidly as dierent technologies are developed and tried out. As a result, companies are appearing, merging, and disappearing quickly. As of this writing, some of the available 3D programs include Blaxxun (http://www.blaxxun.com) and ActiveWorlds (http://www.activeworlds.com). As noted, more powerful hardware, higher bandwidth communications, and newer software may soon alleviate some of the current drawbacks to 3D graphical chat programs. 4. Educational applications Increasingly, the preferred instructional strategies for a variety of goals, objectives, and learners stress active collaborative learning, with extensive communications among learners while solving problems, producing reports, or otherwise engaging in real-world tasks. The learners are usually all located in the same place, but there is no necessary instructional reason that they cannot be distributed widely. In fact, there might be substantial educational bene®ts to bringing together widely diverse points of view. With Internet-based synchronous communications it is becoming simple and inexpensive to create learning groups that collaborate from a variety of locations around the country or the world. How might these groups work? We have begun experimenting with a variety of ways of using 2D graphical chat in educational settings. Some of the uses we are examining include initiatives in several areas. 4.1. Distance education In our academic environment, with graduate students whose classes normally meet one day a week, we are ®nding synchronous online discussions a useful way to either extend the classroom hours so that educationally valuable conversations can be continued between class meetings or even to replace many classes altogether (McCollum, 1997). Students often seem to appreciate the ability to interact with each other outside of and even instead of in the classroom. The authors have used chat in many classes, but most especially in ``Instructional
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Applications of the Internet'', which is now being conducted almost entirely on the Internet. Regular online discussion is an integral part of the course for classes and group discussions and collaboration. 4.2. Virtual problem solving groups There are at least two ways that graphical synchronous discussion software can facilitate virtual or distributed problem solving groups. One is as a communications medium within a larger instructional context. The other is as the problem solving environment itself. In the ®rst instance, students from a variety of locations are all given a problem to solve as a group. The chat software serves as the medium for those students to discuss the problem, divide up the work, meet, try out solutions, and so on. The room they meet in may simply resemble a comfortable, inviting place to talk. A group of seventh graders from a local middle school has set up a series of rooms to support their ongoing Future Problem Solving activities. The activities are the same ones they have been doing in small, in-person groups anyway. Such software adds the ability to convene groups from a wide area, potentially increasing the variety of the points of view in the groups and adding to the problem solving experience. We are now expanding our reach beyond the local schools to bringing distant problem solvers into the fold. In the second instance, the chat room (or more likely rooms) becomes the problem solving environment and actually adds information, tasks, and other elements to the situation. An example is the Weather Problem Solver we developed for elementary school children. Through extensive scripting, the series of rooms is set up so that problem solving is possible only in groups of three. When a group forms, the students enter the problem solving area, where they are given the weather forecasting task. In the next room, they split up to gather information about humidity, barometric pressure, and cloud formations and the relationships of each to weather forecasting. These rooms present a series of examples to those who visit, thus demanding that students work out some principles of weather forecasting themselves. When they have accumulated as much information as they can, the students gather in a group problem solving room, where they are asked to predict a day's weather from a set of data. This environment encourages both individual problem solving (in generating the principles that relate humidity, pressure, and clouds to weather conditions) and group problem solving (in forecasting weather from all three variables, each of which is understood by only one participant). The chat software in this case not only facilitates group work, it becomes the problem solving environment itself. 4.3. Community problem solving activities It is possible for schoolchildren to communicate with more than just other schoolchildren. For example, children could go online with experts in various ®elds, community leaders, and others. As an example of this we are currently working with a gifted/talented class in a local school district on a ``community problem solving'' project. The children are concerned with the health and viability of the Cuyahoga River in Northeast Ohio. To work on the problems associated with the river, they have created a set of chat rooms that they hope will facilitate problem solving processes. A grant from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources allowed
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them to buy enough registered copies of the client software to distribute to scientists and community leaders as well as to other children. They are using their online time to discuss problems and solutions for the Cuyahoga. 4.4. Historic recreations The graphical, partly VR quality of 2D chat software allows the possibility of creating environments that re-create historical or other sites. With photographs or graphics, the environments can look extremely realistic. Although virtual tours of current or historical places are already available on the World Wide Web (e.g. Colonial Williamsburg at http:// www.history.org), graphical chat software adds another dimension. In such a site, there can be online tour guides who take you around the site (if that is what you want), pointing out features of interest and explaining the historical background. You can also meet others who are visiting the site and ®nd out why they are there, where they are from, and what they know about it. Some sites, like the Battle of the Little Bighorn, could result in extremely active discussions and arguments among the proponents of various views. Other issues are of global importance, such as the environment, and a good chat site devoted to them might attract an equally global audience (McMahen & Dawson, 1995). 4.5. Exploration of cultural dierences Educators stress ``diversity'' these days, but it is often dicult for schools to ®nd opportunities for children from genuinely dierent cultures to interact and learn from one another. Usually, the school population is drawn from a limited geographical area, with familiar groups and individuals within it. Chat software oers an opportunity to bring people together to talk without having to bring them together physically. We would like to see palaces developed that re¯ect a particular local culture. They would need to be advertised to attract students from all over and staed by students from the local culture. The local students would be there to explain the signi®cance of the environment, answer questions about the site, and ask questions in turn. This could allow students the opportunity to practice role playing as they enter into dierent cultures and try to experience them from the inside. If the other people in a chat room treat the student as an actual representative of the culture, he or she might be able to experience a little better what it is like. CyberPalace (palace://castle.about.or.jp:9998/) represents one example of this possibility, with beautiful graphics of Japan and some opportunity to converse with others in Japanese. However, it concentrates more on using the software to present a kind of slide show, with surprisingly little real interactivity. Therefore, it also serves as a reminder that the real strength of chat programs is as an environment for conversation. 4.6. Language skill development A key to learning another language is being able to practice the skills. This can be dicult if the only other people you know who speak it are those in your class who are also struggling to learn. Again, 2D chat environment oers a means to circumvent this limitation. In a chat
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program you have to be quick with the keyboard and concentrate on communicating eectively rather than just on getting the right answer. In general, participation in second language learning can increase when using synchronous CMC. Learners have the opportunity to correct mistakes without interrupting the ¯ow of the conversation. Lack of ¯uency with the language is not as evident as with f2f communications, and the need for explicit turn taking may be reduced (Kelm, 1992). In a related study, we are currently exploring the use of chat to help deaf students learn written English. It is commonplace that in order to learn a language, you have to converse in it. Deaf students readily learn American Sign Language (ASL) in this way, but ASL does not transfer directly to written English, which is a separate language and a separate learning issue for these students. We are using chat software to provide a conversational environment in which deaf students can converse in written English and thereby increase their skills. 4.7. Counseling Chat rooms and sites can be restricted to allow only certain people to enter, or the occupants of a chat ``room'' can often choose to lock the door behind them for a private conversation. This makes it possible to conduct very personal, sensitive discussions with individuals or groups. One place where this ability is important is in counseling students. Young people today have many con®dential topics that they might want to discuss with an understanding adult. However, it is often dicult to do so in person. Chat programs oer a potentially anonymous forum where youngsters can discuss subjects like sex, drugs, or AIDS in privacy and safety. We ran a four-week support group for graduate students using 2D graphical chat, with interesting results and implications for both communications and counseling (Page et al., in press). 4.8. Student±teacher interactions For graduate students and others who do not see their instructors often (once a week or sometimes less), getting the personal information and guidance essential for good education is often dicult. It can be too time-consuming to drive for 45 min for a 10 min consultation during oce hours, and frustrating to play telephone tag. Online oce hours using synchronous communications can be one solution. So far, our experience has been that oce hours using chat are a tough sell, however. Those who use it like it, but most students cannot or will not install the software and go online at speci®ed times just for this purpose. Perhaps developing 2D discussion environments as solutions in other areas ®rst will lead to increased use for the mundane task of talking with an instructor during oce hours. 4.9. Student±student communications Increasingly students are being expected to communicate with other students about the courses they take and the subjects they study. Collaborative learning has become an important component of education at all levels, and the teacher, in many cases, is becoming more a facilitator than the sole director of the educational experience. While
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many situations permit frequent contact among students, others do not. Again, graduate students who meet once a week may ®nd it dicult to get to know one another, let alone continue meaningful educational conversations outside of class. Some college students and a wide variety of other adult learners and trainees may be in similar situations. Once again, both synchronous and asynchronous Internet-based communications may provide a way around this problem. KidsNation (palace://kidsnation.com), a 2D graphical chat environment designed and maintained for children, illustrates some of the possibility of communications primarily among students below college level. It provides brightly colored graphics, lots of action, the chance to converse with other children from all over, and a safe online environment. Adult ``wizards'' patrol the environment to ensure that children both behave themselves and are not harassed. In addition, KidsNation includes links to the Web, oering children a place to post their stories, poems, and artwork. One of the authors (Ingram) teaches a course almost entirely on the Internet. Once the technical problems are resolved at the beginning of a semester, students seem happy to meet online. Graphical chat is an integral part of this course, since the class meets as a whole every week or two using that software. More important, after a few weeks students begin to feel the need for more direct interaction with one another, and they schedule small group discussions in the environment themselves. Some of these are more technically sophisticated students, so that is probably a factor. Others, however, are students who start out very anxious and uncertain about the technology but quickly come to enjoy it and understand its power. Eventually, we have found, students engage in complex discussions online with little or no intervention from the instructor and even organize virtual ®eld trips to sites elsewhere, like Japan. We can envision this environment being used for student-to-student communications in several ways. First, there is simply the possibility of continuing useful educational discussions outside the classroom. For motivated students this can be the best way to try out their ideas on each other, defend them against criticism, and come to a common understanding of key concepts. Second, it is possible to provide assignments that require collaborative learning and problem solving. When students are dispersed geographically (at least between class meetings), synchronous communications media allow better collaboration than many other possibilities. Finally, although we personally haven't tried this yet, we can see graphical chat environments providing students an opportunity for educational role playing in which they interact with one another as other personae. For example, a chat area could be set up that reproduces the look of Independence Hall and parts of Philadelphia in the late 18th century. With props representing common clothing of the time, students could take dierent roles based on the Continental Congress and/or the Constitutional Convention to see where the arguments took them. The ideas presented here do not constitute a complete list of the potential uses of graphical chat programs. Students themselves often ®nd new uses for the technology, such as the graduate students with children who use it during computer classes to keep in touch with home. Others use it for discussions and exchanging information with drawing and props. Teachers, too, can ®nd alternative uses over time.
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5. Future directions of research and practice A key problem we have encountered in using online chat, even with advanced graduate students, has been moving people from seeing the program as an essentially social environment to seeing and using it as an educational tool. Anyone who has used chat programs before has probably done so in a social, free-form context. Those who are inexperienced with chat quickly pick up on the opportunities for social interaction that are presented. In an educational context the issue then becomes how to get people to focus on meaningful tasks and discussions. We have begun to research this process. Since many chat environments, from MUDs to The Palace and beyond, originated as social, game-playing programs, it is not surprising that it encourages that kind of behavior. The anonymity that is possible in most synchronous CMC environments also contributes to the development of dierent codes of conduct online. Graphical chat environments may oer an advantage over others for education, however. Text-based chat programs are essentially devoid of social and physical context, so behavior may be especially uninhibited. Hostility is openly expressed in such situations as well as other possibly inappropriate emotions. (The situation may be even worse in asynchronous communications.) The purely text-based nature of the communications forces people to ®nd ways to express things that might ordinarily be communicated with facial expressions and body language. These strategies include the use of ``emoticons'', changing the use of language, and using commonly accepted abbreviations like LOL (for ``Laughing Out Loud''). Graphical programs oer other ways to express these kinds of emotional and social messages and so may allow people to concentrate more on the content of what they are saying; it replaces some of the non-verbal cues lost in text-only chats. Many variables appear to aect the quality of educational discussions using synchronous computer-mediated communications. These include variables associated with the learners, variables associated with the technical environment, and variables associated with the educational and social environment. Examples of learner variables include age and educational level, familiarity with computers and the Internet, typing skills, motivation for participating in a given discussion, as well as many others. The technical environment includes such variables as the speed and reliability of the connections, the nature of the graphical rooms and avatars used by participants, and many others. Finally, the educational and social environment encompasses such things as the tasks given the students to complete, the rules that govern the conversations, the sources of those rules, the familiarity of the participants with one another (for example, do they know one another or not?), the size of the discussion groups, and the distances over which the chat is taking place. 5.1. The environment If the graphical backgrounds of and relationships among the rooms weren't at least potentially important, then there wouldn't be any point to using a graphical chat room environment. The question is how to make good use of this extra dimension over purely textbased programs. Clearly, the answer depends on the goals of the environment, the learners, and other factors. Georgia Institute of Technology (http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/techlinc/) has
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created a virtual classroom where faculty hold oce hours and students can collaborate on projects. One room, The Web Resource Room, has the appearance of a library, but is linked to various Web sites and search engines. Syracuse University customized The Palace to create the award winning AskERIC virtual classroom. Designed for ease of use, but with the look and feel of an authentic classroom, it includes extra navigation devices, a map, and a white board. There is even a button for raising a hand. 5.2. The task The ®rst element to consider is the task that is set for the learners (or that they set for themselves). As with in-person discussions, it is rarely sucient to simply ask a group of people to ``discuss this topic''. What does that mean? What level of discussion is requested? What should be the result of the discussion? Unless we provide answers to these questions to the learners, almost any discussion they have will ®t the criteria. A clear task with some product expected at the end of the discussion goes a long way towards helping groups concentrate and towards making them accountable for their discussions. The product could be as simple as a summary of the discussion or something more elaborate like the solution to a problem or a Web page. For example, an eective discussion topic in the course on Instructional Applications of the Internet taught by the ®rst author is ``Acceptable Use Policies''. The task is to produce a list of the major points that must be written into such a policy for a school or district. The discussion is integrated into the course framework as a whole, and the results do aect students'' grades. This is in accordance with other research showing the need for such an incentive (Velayo, 1994). The second important point about the task is that synchronous communications do not lend themselves to all types of discussions equally. The environment, graphical or not, encourages quick interactions, fast responses, and, often, little re¯ective thought. The need for fast typing also may interfere with students' abilities to concentrate and re¯ect on the topics at hand. Dierences in typing speed may result in large dierences in participation in the conversations. Discussions that require background research and careful re¯ection are more appropriate for asynchronous online discussions. One saving feature of many online chats is the ability to record all the incoming text so that one can return to it later. This can encourage re¯ection, especially after a fast and furious discussion is over. Chat environments are good for discussions that build on the strengths of the medium: brainstorming, some kinds of problem solving, and similar tasks. 5.3. Rules Next, a set of rules is useful for controlling and directing a chat-based discussion. Often, learners will buy into the rules better if they have had a hand in developing them. The rules may range from simple social norms Ð no ``¯aming'' or obnoxious behavior Ð to speci®c procedures for deciding who ``has the ¯oor'' and consequently the right to speak. For example, in the counseling study mentioned earlier, the students had a prop in the form of a Prozac2 pill. When someone wanted to talk he or she moved the pill to his or her avatar. When the comment was complete, he or she moved the prop back to a neutral part of the room. This
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facilitated keeping the discussion focused, without the problem of going in a myriad of dierent directions. The participants eventually felt comfortable enough to interject short ontask comments without the prop, but generally respected the self-imposed rule for longer comments.
5.4. Group size Synchronous discussions usually work best with small groups of three to ®ve people. Any larger than that and the rooms tend to divide into separate discussion groups anyway, although membership might shift back and forth. Very large groups are essentially unmanageable, except by using elements of the software that can make chat programs into presentation media: one person lecturing to a group online. To us, this defeats the primary purposes behind using chat, which is interaction.
5.5. Identity It is possible to disguise one's identity completely in most chat programs. By using misleading costumes and props and a ®ctitious name, one can hide one's true identity pretty successfully, unless there are clues in the statements one types and sends. However, we consider this undesirable in an educational context. One part of productive educational discussions is taking responsibility for what one says. The anonymity possible in most chat environments can defeat that requirement, so we recommend that students use their own names and not try either to be anonymous or to actively mislead the group about their identities. Communication will be easier to sustain, and an individual's behavior is likely to be more predictable and more on-task. One way to enhance this eect is to have people use small photographs of themselves as props. This makes it even more like an in-person discussion. What might be lost here are greater creativity and willingness to take risks with ideas if one is anonymous (Ahern & Durrington, 1996; Olaniran, 1994).
5.6. Moderation One question that must be faced in setting up and running synchronous discussions is whether it is necessary or desirable to have a moderator Ð someone to lead the discussion, keep it on track, and so forth. Velayo (1994) suggests that a moderator is desirable, but that it is also necessary for any moderator to be ¯exible, since it is impossible to predict the course of the discussion. Some factors that might aect the need for a moderator include the size of the group, the level of the participants (in our experience middle schoolers may be more likely to need ®rm moderation than graduate students, but not always!), the engaging nature of the task, and even the speci®c individuals in the group. Berge (1996) discusses how best to moderate or facilitate on online discussion.
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6. Disadvantages of synchronous communications Synchronous chat is not necessarily an unmitigated good as a communications medium for education, of course. There are signi®cant drawbacks that aect how and where it can be used eectively. We have already mentioned the fact that it does not always lend itself to deep re¯ective conversations. Although factors like the type of task given and the skill of the online moderator may alleviate this problem, the fact remains that synchronous conversations place a premium on quick thinking and fast typing over careful thought. In addition, and probably even more so than in f2f discussions, many of the comments made in chat rooms are trivial and do not contribute to the discussion, at least not directly. At the same time, such seemingly o-task comments may be important to establishing the social dimension of the chat adequately. Conversely, it also appears to be true that participants in synchronous discussions can become overloaded with information. This may be another good argument for keeping the groups small. It also may indicate a frequent need for skillful moderation in an online discussion.
7. Evaluating synchronous discussions While one might not want to grade students on the quality of their online discussions (although a grade might be appropriate for the products of such discussions), one might still want to assess the discussions for clues about how they went, how helpful they were, and how to improve them in the future. The primary source of data for such evalutions is the logs kept by the programs. Chat users can usually choose to record any and all conversations on her/his own computer. If an instructor is serving as moderator or facilitator for a discussion, for example, he/she could log everything that is said in the room for review later. These logs could even be distributed to students for them to re¯ect on after the discussion is over. Often the chat server can also be set up to log all discussions. This record contains even more information, such as the time that each comment was received by the server. This can be a valuable information for researchers and teachers. However, if numerous conversations are taking place in dierent rooms, it can be dicult to sort out the individual threads. The key to the eective use of chat logs for studying the course of online discussions is the use of adequate coding schemes for the logs. One student (Proudfoot, 1996) used a graphing technique to chart the course of a discussion. This involved using dierently shaped nodes to represent the types of comments Ð questions, responses, o-task, and so forth Ð and connectors to trace the ¯ow of the conversation. This method showed a clear dierence in the charts generated for a well-moderated and a poorly-moderated discussion: a poorly moderated discussion had few interconnections and many dead ends; a well-moderated discussion was far more interconnected. In other studies we are coding the logs to measure the amount of actual collaboration that takes place. Wild & Braid (1997) propose a coding scheme for children's interactions in groups which may also apply to online discussions. Such a taxonomy divides comments into clear categories of on-task and o-task behavior.
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8. Conclusions As computer networks and the Internet become more widespread, educators are looking for applications that enhance their educational eectiveness. In spite of an initial visceral reaction against synchronous communications in the form of chat rooms because of their reputation, educators can and should ®nd valuable ways of using programs like this. To the extent that communicating with other people is a central part of education, computer-mediated communications can help improve education by extending the range of the discussions, increasing the numbers and diversity of the people involved, and improving the continuity over time of the communities created. We have found that graphical chat programs can be used eectively to hold discussions with students over a distance, to bring together people who may not otherwise communicate, and to create environments that encourage role playing, conversation, and collaboration. At the same time, it is clear that in most circumstances synchronous CMC is only one of the ways of using the Internet for instructional purposes. Chat technology is good for some kinds of discussions. For others, asynchronous communications might be more eective, and the World Wide Web is still the premier medium for disseminating information. Like most educational technologies, graphical chat programs can be used eectively or ineectively. When using synchronous CMC, one must take care to use tasks, group sizes, moderating techniques, and other variables that increase the probability that the resulting discussions will have educational value. Merely instructing students to discuss a topic is likely to result in short super®cial conversations with little educational value. However, good tasks supported by meaningful graphical environments and avatars can be highly eective. Similarly, groups of the right size that follow some simple discussion rules can produce good results. In spite of the increasing numbers of trials, demonstration projects, and even research studies, however, we are still very early in the process of ®nding out how best to use this medium in instruction. Which is ``best:'' text, 2D graphics, or 3D graphics? What tasks do we set, and what do learners gain from them? How do learning outcomes compare between online and f2f discussions? What eects do graphical rooms and props add to the mix? We have many questions and only a relatively few answers. One thing is clear: synchronous CMC can have a positive eect on what we do in education. References Ahern, T. C., & Durrington, V. (1996). Eects of anonymity and group saliency on participation and interaction in a computer-mediated small-group discussion. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 28(2), 133±147. Barnett, J., & Gray, D. (1997). Ocial palace tour guide. Research Triangle Park, NC: Ventana Communications Group. Berge, Z. (1996). The role of the online instructor/facilitator. [Online] Available: http://www.emoderators.com/ moderators/teach_online.html. Furst-Bowe, J. (1996). MOOs for teaching and learning. Techtrends, 41, 3±5. Jonassen, D. H. (1995). Supporting communities of learners with technology: a vision for integrating technology with learning in schools. Educational Technology, 35(4), 60±63. Kelm, O. R. (1992). The use of synchronous computer networks in second language instruction: A Preliminary Report. Foreign Language Annals, 25(5), 441±454.
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McCollum, K. (1997). Two universities put a chat-room program to an academic purpose. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 44. McMahen, C., & Dawson, A. J. (1995). The design and implementation of environmental computer-mediated communication (cmc) projects. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 27(3), 318±335. Olaniran, B. A. (1994). Group performance in computer-mediated and face-to-face communication media. Management Communication Quarterly, 7(3), 256±281. Page, B. J., Delmonico, D. L., Walsh, J., L'Amoreaux, N. A., Danninhirsh, C., Thompson, R. S., Ingram, A. L., & Evans, A. D. (in press). Setting up on-line support groups using the palace software. Journal for Specialists in Group Work. Proudfoot, J. (1996). Personal communication. Reid, E. M. Electropolis: communication and community on internet relay chat. [Online] Available: http:// people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html. Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison± Wesley. Velayo, R. S. (1994). Supplementary classroom instruction via computer conferencing. Educational Technology, 34(3), 20±26. Wild, M., & Braid, P. (1997). A model for measuring children's interactions in small groups using computers. Journal of Computing in Childhood Education, 8(2/3), 215±225.