Empowering Learners through Computer-Mediated-Communication: A Literature Review

Presenter: Jeanne Winstead and Michael Collura
Educational Technology

CmC is the Key - Open Doors with CmC

Abstract

In 1998, I experienced a radical life-style change. I moved out on the World-Wide-Web much as pioneers of yesteryear pulled up roots and pointed their wagons west. Actually I had already been an Internet user for several years, mostly using email. But even though I had also started to do on-line shopping and on-line
research, I had not really connected. All that changed in January of 1998 when a television series called Prey with an interesting twist on the theory of evolution aired on ABC. The show totally captivated me. My local writers' group had just started writing a piece of round-robin fiction, and I based my contribution on the premise of this show. So I started writing along with the series week to week. I also started searching the Web for reviews of the series and eventually found a fan site that used an implementation of WebBBS, an electronic bulletin board, to communicate with one another. The message board was very, very interactive, attracting fans of the show from all over the US and Canada, and even some of the show's creative team. The discussions were stimulating and fun. I discovered that the computer was something that could transform affective areas of my life. It could let me outside of the boundaries of Lafayette, Indiana to meet intelligent and interesting people with shared interests that I would never have met otherwise, and it could add a more personal dimension to broadcast media story-telling. I found the on-line experience exhilarating and powerful. We moved from discussing the show to organizing to save the show when it went on hiatus in April of 1998. In the years that followed, new fans joined us from around the world as Prey aired in thirty-four countries. Many have attained rather amazing outcomes from this on-line involvement, including enhanced computer/multi-media skills and knowledge of setting up web sites. We have also gained personal and social/relational skills as we forged an on-line, cross-cultural, collaborative community that persists yet today at http://preyforus.hypermart.net/cgi-bin/webbbs433/preyforus. During the events of September 11, the message board morphed yet again, as people from all over the world checked in to say they were okay, to see if others were okay, and to share what was going on in their respective corners of the world. During those dark days, I split my time between the television set and the computer!

But perhaps most pertinent to the theme of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Showcase 2002, many of these netizens, including myself, have experienced grass-roots empowerment not only to shape our entertainment destinies, but also our personal lives. This year in particular through the grass-roots empowerment of the Internet, little people have gotten the industry - both networks and creators - to publicly acknowledge their existence and to interact with them on both broad and narrow-band media such as television, newspapers, and the web. Around the same time as I was "homesteading my stake on the electronic frontier" (Rheingold, 1993), I also began a Master's degree in Educational Technology
through Purdue's School of Education. Knowing how the Prey on-line experience has touched and transformed people, I became very interested in how Computer-Mediated-Communication (henceforth referred to as CMC) such as the on-line message board I had participated in, might be used in learning
environments to motivate and engage students in the learning process.

I read approximately twenty quantitative and qualitative research articles on CMC from various areas of psychology, education, communication, computer systems, and anthropology.

Several themes about the strengths and weaknesses of CMC emerged, a few of which follow:

(1) Despite the supposed convenience of CMC, collaborative learning on-line actually takes longer than FtF, a fact that practitioners need to take into account in planning their courses.

(2) Properties of CMC such as anonymity and lack of social cues change the classroom or learning community from being teacher-centered to being student-discourse centered and facilitate knowledge construction. (Practitioners should be aware that "grading" on-line discussions may introduce an
inhibitor or distraction to CMC users.)

(3) Highly interactive groups are more likely to sustain their memberships, and yield other desired outcomes such as symmetry in contributions, creativity, productivity, agreement, humor, and sense of belonging".

The readings also suggested directions of future research:

(1) The importance of the CMC context in motivation and learning

(2) The effect of 'time distortion' on CMC communities.

(3) Comparison of various asynchronous tools to identify features that enhance engagement and interactivity.

(4) Do skills attained from CMC carry over to FtF (face-to-face communication)?

Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.

Contact: Jeanne Winstead and Michael Collura