From: Nick.Carbone@WRITING.UMASS.EDU
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Subject: Reply to M.D's ritualized behaviour
Date: 12 Oct 92 16:01:54 GMT
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
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When Margaret Daisley notes how students' behaviours (and teachers) become
ritualized over time, I think she points to one of the reasons computer
networked writing classrooms _can_ work so differently.  A student arrives
for the first class with those rituals ingrained, probably, since most
are first year college that I see, coming from high schools where there
may have been some workshop/process writing done, but a lot of it
was teacher centered and controlled.  And even if it wasn't, the writing
class may have been the one exception.  Most students I see seem ritualized
in the Instructor pitches topic, one student responds, directing comment more
to instructor, instructor comments on student response mode.  Students who
do speak, wait their turn, wait for instructor to turn to them, kind of like
obedient puppies waiting for a scratch behind their ears.
     Students know this, or variations on this quite well.  They also know
what they feel comfortable doing/not doing in these modes.  Since a college
classroom doesn't usually look much different than a highschool classroom--desks
in rows, one big one at the head for the teacher--the first step accross teh
threshold confirms the ritual.  It does take a mighty and energetic paradigm
buster to thwart that--some fifteen or so years of scholastic memory and habit.
   But when a student crosses the door into a computer-networked classroom,
double checks there class assignment sheet to make sure they're in the
right class--"is this where the writing class is?", the room's
architecture and look are already questioning the rituals and expectations
they know and have.
    That's a start.  But as Bob notes, what  a teacher does with that matters
most.  A teacher determined to lecture can turn a computer-networked classroom
into a sweat shop instead of a community of writers work shop.
    Using CMC helps teachers break the teacher-student response-teacher comment
model because the structure that fosters that is lost in the online world.  Even
when a teacher begins a discussion by posting the first message in an online
discussion, what follows makes it impossible for them to respond to each
student who speaks.  Instead of waiting for a turn, waiting silently and po-
litely, knowing that if she does speak, others will be silent and watching
and listening, putting her in the spotlight (or on the spot), students all
speak at once in CMC.  If one were to read and Interchange
transcript as it occured, you'd here a chorus of voices.
    This aspect seems to me the most ritual breaking.  There's an excitement
too when messages come onto the screen.  They come in the order they are sent.
There is not special place that  the teacher's message goes, it just ends
up in the scroll, part of the chorus.
    There is some anxiety to this sometimes.  Sometimes students sense that
they're not being heard because they may ask a question that doesn't get answer-
ed or some such thing.  But that is healthy, it's the anxiety of growth, of
learning that not everything can be attended too.  When I reread transcripts and
see questions asked that went unresponded to, or when there's a follow up
message asking when I'm going to respond to there concern, it is rare that
a student still wants it when I speak to them about it later, after the
conference.   They usually will find that a classmate had the answer or that
they figured out what they needed to know on their own.
    In an oral discussion, where only one could speak and the rest of us
would listen, that probably wouldn't have happened.
     CMC undoes a lot of the protocols that students are used to.  In
our Computers and Composition class last year, Charlie Moran likened that
to the way telephones changed the way people talked to eachother, the
way conventions emerged for using the phone which differed radically
from exchanging letters.
   In some ways, and in some kinds of CMC both of those technologies become
combined.
   nick.carbone@writing.umass.edu
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU