The chat was distracting me from attending the live video in an efficient way. While I was reading the chat messages, I was missing the flow of the discussion.
On the other hand, it’s true that there was interactivity in the chat and it was helpful that a participant could ask a question to the panelists or other participants.
So, finally, I am favourable to the chat. .)
Speaking purely for myself, I detect an antagonism between live video debate observation and chat interaction participation. The simultaneous operation of visual dialogue among panelists and chat box interaction is in a certain degree dysfunctional. One cannot participate simultaneously in both ways of interactive learning in an effective way. Instead of complementing one another, these two different mechanisms in the learning proccess end up to be substitutes for one another due to the parallel and at-the-same-time (trans-)action. Of course, in case one decides to stay exclusively focused either on the written dialogue or on the video debate, then one can learn effectively. Personally speaking, I do believe that chat is more ''interactive" than "learning", is more for social interaction than for in-depth user-created content and analysis. The term "learning" in the chat stays restricted more on a superficial level and therefore lacks in-depth approach. The higher the number of persons they interact in chat, the more the number of topics for discussion they arise, the more difficult for someone to follow. I regard forums and videos as two very effective learning mechanisms and I prefer them to chat. And I see the audiovisual dialogue as the best way of interactive learning.
the chat is Interactive learning, which is always better. with the video you can skip a few things that you don't understand, but with the chat you have to respond and to do that you must understand first, which means you'll pay more attention and ask questions where things are not clear!
Obviously, it is in the chat. The widespread use of information by youngsters for social interaction is impacting on their learning needs. There is evidence that online participants joyfully use such a tool for education and learning purposes, often outside the classroom.
The example of chatrooms shows the power and potential of peer production and user-created content in learning. Panelists do not merely impart knowledge but rather offer informational strategies for learning, guiding chat participants in a quest for understanding information, questioning it and converting it into knowledge.
In this way, chatters no longer have to "follow up a straight planned journey by the speaker", without having any reaction to it like those information parrots, dependent on others for information, but they are invited to use attractive technological opportunities which provide new ways of learning.
I enjoyed both the presentation and the sidebar chat
Good morning from New Orleans! I have attended many webinars and in fact our monthly faculty meetings are held online in a similar fashion to the eluminate system. I find that both the formal presentation and the informal chats are important to the attendees. I admit that sometimes the chat portion can unintentionally play a larger role in a webinar than perhaps expected. In the one in question here, I believe everyone was so thrilled to see the diversity of the participants (over 100 at one point) all of whom share common interests and goals. We had to take advantage of the opportunity to communicate with our multi-national colleagues and I don't think language educators are a particularly shy bunch! Perhaps the format of the webinar can be tweaked to allow more interaction via the chat without detracting from the excellent presentations?
Hello all,
During the webinar the live chat gave me the possibility to follow along the conversation interesting comments. It also made the communication easier and helpful instructions were given without interrupting the webinar.
Katerina,
yes I agree with you - I, too, felt that chatroom gave us privacy despite the debate being public.
I now think the chatroom gave the kind of freedom we are (or "were") traditionally not allowed in lectures / lessons. Do you remember how, in some lessons, you were dying to talk to sb sitting next you but you didn't want to be rude towards the teacher? In the webinar, we have the teacher (the panelists) and the other students (other chat participants) with whom you can freely talk during the lesson (webinar) without disturbing anyone! And that doesn't hamper learning, does it?
I personally was present at the webinar but from my earlier experience I prefer the video. It is more organised and I can follow up a straight "planned" journey by the speaker. I like to watch Talks on youtube for that same reason, I get input that is well structured (well mostly) so that I can follow the reasoning.
As mentioned here, the chat is more interactive but I prefer comments or forums in that sense because it is easier to follow up and usually I can get my point across whereas in a chat I always have the impression that alot of what is said gets "lost".
A very interesting topic of discussion, indeed, thanks Sylvia and Sarah !
Participating in webinars is an activity that emerged recently (last 5 years?) and from then there are more and more possibilities to attend a conference or a speech from your sofa…this is a radical shift in the participation modes that does not leave the intact the nature of interaction…
If you happen to attend webinars (I really recommend the very active Classroom web 2.0 series of webcasts, http://www.classroom20.com/... ) you’ll find a range of types of webinars. All over internet, there is no webinar that is identical to another, although there are several types that can be identified. Without wanting to oversimplify things, webinars can range from discussions where the chat functionality is turned off and participants only listen and vote, to online participants being able to use a micro to ask questions on the top of chat, to the panelists in front of their screen directly taking questions, to recordings of expert talks that participants can comment after the talk (and not during the speech), etc.
I think that for researchers engaged in computer mediated communication, these now forms of interaction with experts and the community allow for deep reflection in terms of narratives, attitudes, engagement, learning and collaboration. We are far from being able to say
The more I read messages by Sylvia and Sarah, the more it seems that questions come into my mind. Here are a couple of those:
-did online participants really want their exchanges to be shared with panelists (it seemed to me –and perhaps I was wrong- that everything was not addressed to the panelists, as Sarah wrote, sometimes it was a parallel discussion between experienced teachers and colleagues)
-this (from time to time) parallel discussion was crucial to be shared publicly with panelists and the face-to-face participants? Correct me in this point but being a participant at our first webinar, hosted by the University of Turku in February, I often felt happy in the “online cocoon” of the chat, discussing with peers and expanding the discussion there, although the panelists kept talking. Do other online participants shared this feeling of conviviality in the chat room that, although it occurred in a public space of a panel, it was still something “semi-private”?
-what about multitasking and different foci of attention? Multi-literacies?
Thanks for your message - I've been discussing the same thing with colleagues since Friday. I think your first reaction, i.e. "that the chat was interactive in the sense that I could ask and reply, not only receive." is certainly one determining factor. Others may be that the discussions were very intense in both modes making it difficult for even the best multi-tasker to carefully follow both discussions. I can imagine it was also difficult to moderate our text chat because rather than a group of students, we were a group of colleagues eager to share ideas. I also thought about the fact that when we do online exchanges, students have tasks to complete and though the conversation often goes off-topic, it has to come back on-topic if they want to complete a task. Here there was no topic, just listening and sharing, and, as you say, the text chat was more interactive for distance participants.
I too look forward to hearing what others think!
Comments
The chat was distracting me from attending the live video in an efficient way. While I was reading the chat messages, I was missing the flow of the discussion.
On the other hand, it’s true that there was interactivity in the chat and it was helpful that a participant could ask a question to the panelists or other participants.
So, finally, I am favourable to the chat. .)
Speaking purely for myself, I detect an antagonism between live video debate observation and chat interaction participation. The simultaneous operation of visual dialogue among panelists and chat box interaction is in a certain degree dysfunctional. One cannot participate simultaneously in both ways of interactive learning in an effective way. Instead of complementing one another, these two different mechanisms in the learning proccess end up to be substitutes for one another due to the parallel and at-the-same-time (trans-)action. Of course, in case one decides to stay exclusively focused either on the written dialogue or on the video debate, then one can learn effectively. Personally speaking, I do believe that chat is more ''interactive" than "learning", is more for social interaction than for in-depth user-created content and analysis. The term "learning" in the chat stays restricted more on a superficial level and therefore lacks in-depth approach. The higher the number of persons they interact in chat, the more the number of topics for discussion they arise, the more difficult for someone to follow. I regard forums and videos as two very effective learning mechanisms and I prefer them to chat. And I see the audiovisual dialogue as the best way of interactive learning.
the chat is Interactive learning, which is always better. with the video you can skip a few things that you don't understand, but with the chat you have to respond and to do that you must understand first, which means you'll pay more attention and ask questions where things are not clear!
Obviously, it is in the chat. The widespread use of information by youngsters for social interaction is impacting on their learning needs. There is evidence that online participants joyfully use such a tool for education and learning purposes, often outside the classroom.
The example of chatrooms shows the power and potential of peer production and user-created content in learning. Panelists do not merely impart knowledge but rather offer informational strategies for learning, guiding chat participants in a quest for understanding information, questioning it and converting it into knowledge.
In this way, chatters no longer have to "follow up a straight planned journey by the speaker", without having any reaction to it like those information parrots, dependent on others for information, but they are invited to use attractive technological opportunities which provide new ways of learning.
Good morning from New Orleans! I have attended many webinars and in fact our monthly faculty meetings are held online in a similar fashion to the eluminate system. I find that both the formal presentation and the informal chats are important to the attendees. I admit that sometimes the chat portion can unintentionally play a larger role in a webinar than perhaps expected. In the one in question here, I believe everyone was so thrilled to see the diversity of the participants (over 100 at one point) all of whom share common interests and goals. We had to take advantage of the opportunity to communicate with our multi-national colleagues and I don't think language educators are a particularly shy bunch! Perhaps the format of the webinar can be tweaked to allow more interaction via the chat without detracting from the excellent presentations?
Hello all,
During the webinar the live chat gave me the possibility to follow along the conversation interesting comments. It also made the communication easier and helpful instructions were given without interrupting the webinar.
Katerina,
yes I agree with you - I, too, felt that chatroom gave us privacy despite the debate being public.
I now think the chatroom gave the kind of freedom we are (or "were") traditionally not allowed in lectures / lessons. Do you remember how, in some lessons, you were dying to talk to sb sitting next you but you didn't want to be rude towards the teacher? In the webinar, we have the teacher (the panelists) and the other students (other chat participants) with whom you can freely talk during the lesson (webinar) without disturbing anyone! And that doesn't hamper learning, does it?
I personally was present at the webinar but from my earlier experience I prefer the video. It is more organised and I can follow up a straight "planned" journey by the speaker. I like to watch Talks on youtube for that same reason, I get input that is well structured (well mostly) so that I can follow the reasoning.
As mentioned here, the chat is more interactive but I prefer comments or forums in that sense because it is easier to follow up and usually I can get my point across whereas in a chat I always have the impression that alot of what is said gets "lost".
A very interesting topic of discussion, indeed, thanks Sylvia and Sarah !
Participating in webinars is an activity that emerged recently (last 5 years?) and from then there are more and more possibilities to attend a conference or a speech from your sofa…this is a radical shift in the participation modes that does not leave the intact the nature of interaction…
If you happen to attend webinars (I really recommend the very active Classroom web 2.0 series of webcasts, http://www.classroom20.com/... ) you’ll find a range of types of webinars. All over internet, there is no webinar that is identical to another, although there are several types that can be identified. Without wanting to oversimplify things, webinars can range from discussions where the chat functionality is turned off and participants only listen and vote, to online participants being able to use a micro to ask questions on the top of chat, to the panelists in front of their screen directly taking questions, to recordings of expert talks that participants can comment after the talk (and not during the speech), etc.
I think that for researchers engaged in computer mediated communication, these now forms of interaction with experts and the community allow for deep reflection in terms of narratives, attitudes, engagement, learning and collaboration. We are far from being able to say
The more I read messages by Sylvia and Sarah, the more it seems that questions come into my mind. Here are a couple of those:
-did online participants really want their exchanges to be shared with panelists (it seemed to me –and perhaps I was wrong- that everything was not addressed to the panelists, as Sarah wrote, sometimes it was a parallel discussion between experienced teachers and colleagues)
-this (from time to time) parallel discussion was crucial to be shared publicly with panelists and the face-to-face participants? Correct me in this point but being a participant at our first webinar, hosted by the University of Turku in February, I often felt happy in the “online cocoon” of the chat, discussing with peers and expanding the discussion there, although the panelists kept talking. Do other online participants shared this feeling of conviviality in the chat room that, although it occurred in a public space of a panel, it was still something “semi-private”?
-what about multitasking and different foci of attention? Multi-literacies?
Thanks for your message - I've been discussing the same thing with colleagues since Friday. I think your first reaction, i.e. "that the chat was interactive in the sense that I could ask and reply, not only receive." is certainly one determining factor. Others may be that the discussions were very intense in both modes making it difficult for even the best multi-tasker to carefully follow both discussions. I can imagine it was also difficult to moderate our text chat because rather than a group of students, we were a group of colleagues eager to share ideas. I also thought about the fact that when we do online exchanges, students have tasks to complete and though the conversation often goes off-topic, it has to come back on-topic if they want to complete a task. Here there was no topic, just listening and sharing, and, as you say, the text chat was more interactive for distance participants.
I too look forward to hearing what others think!
Sarah