"Place": Classrooms and Cyberspace--A Discourse Analysis of How Place Shapes Interaction and Learning

This is a cross-environmental study focusing on how interactants in two distinct learning settings communicate and engage in course-related planning and problem solving-activities as members of their particular academic community. One setting is a face-to-face class; the second is the identical course offered on-line. The primary methodological approach is discourse analysis. The concept of "place" can be exceptionally simple and yet at the same time quite complex. It can designate geographic areas from nations to villages, social communities from organizations to neighborhoods, and even concepts related to exterior and interior aspects of physical space. It may imply concrete, physical bounds, abstract borders, or limitless expanses in space as well as time. From a more complex perspective, "place" has recently been considered as an important area of social analysis; "place" is political and deeply related to issues of power and identity (Harvey, 1992; Wilson, 2000a and 2000b). Wilson (2000a and 2000b) emphasizes the importance of place in the field of adult education in the political sense, pointing out the crucial relationship between place, identity, and power as they affect learners in a continuing professional education program. Using some of Wilson's ideas as a basic foundation, this paper expands the concept of the mutual relationship between place and identity and investigates how that relationship plays out in learning environments in adult education. This paper represents Phase I of a large scale on-going project which focuses on the interrelationships between "place" and interaction (Hyun, in progress). Specifically, we are examining two different learning settings for an identical introductory course on adult education offered at a large Northeastern university. One context involves a face-to-face, co-present classroom; the second involves the same course offered on-line through the university's distance education program. Crucially, in concert with Wilson's (2000b) argument, we will demonstrate that place indeed matters, in terms of how participants (both students and instructors) in these programs communicate with each other, share knowledge, and construct and re-construct their identities as members of a learning community. More importantly, we will demonstrate how "place" influences interaction and the processes of learning. In this paper, we define "place," or more specifically "learning place," as the site in which interactants exchange ideas, information, and knowledge; share and discuss narratives of personal experience; provide directives, suggestions, and opinions; and engage in planning and problem solving activities, while at the same time forming and re-forming their personal identities as members of their particular academic community. We also treat the concept of "time" as an element inextricably related to "place. " Methodology, Design, and Data This phase of the study is entirely qualitative in nature, and is based on discourse analysis as its primary methodological and analytic tool. Our approach to discourse analysis, while inherently a qualitative method of research, does not necessarily fit into the five 'traditions' commonly discussed in much of the literature on qualitative research, i.e., biography, phenomenology, ethnography, grounded theory, and case study (see Creswell, 1998 and others). Although each of these five traditions is driven by different goals and concentrates on different areas of focus, what seems to underlie them all is an interest in and attention to language-language as it is used in stories, interviews, narratives, conversation, and so on. That is, all five use "talk" as a medium of analysis and all are based on some aspect of empirical observation in order to understand or describe a particular phenomenon or experience. However, the type and nature of the observations and the depth and degree to which language or "talk" is analyzed in these traditions differ significantly from our approach. Further, what we consider as 'data' is the talk and the language itself. As noted, the paper focuses on two different learning settings, one is a face-to-face classroom, and the second, the identical course offered on-line. It is a graduate level course taught during the same semester (i.e., Fall, 2000). Each class was taught by a different instructor, and each had an enrollment of approximately 20-25 students. The data for the project consist of a variety of instances of language use. For the face-to-face class, we placed a video camera in the corner of the room in order to record as much of the actual interaction as possible. The camera was turned on just prior to the start of the class and was not turned off until minutes following the ending of the class, which assured us continuous recording of all activities. We also used supplementary audio equipment to record some of the small group discussions. In all, we collected approximately 21 hours of classroom interaction (i.e., seven full class meetings), distributed nearly evenly throughout the semester (two consecutive meetings at the beginning of the semester, three consecutive meetings in the middle, and two consecutive meetings toward the end of the semester). The data for the on-line version consist of hardcopy print-outs of all course postings including class forum postings, lesson contents, and chat room. Additionally, for both settings we distributed survey questionnaires to all class members and conducted one-on-one interviews with a number of volunteer participants to supplement and enrich our observations. All oral data are transcribed according to the transcription conventions of Conversation Analysis (Atkinson and Heritage, 1984). This allows us to capture the utterances in the same sequential order and with the same prosodic features as they were produced. That is, the conventions allow us to indicate conversational turns by the interactants as well as to graphically note pauses and their approximate lengths, volume shifts, false starts, hedges and hesitation markers, rising and falling intonation, pitch peaks, overlapping speech, and even laughter. The use of the videotape allows us to also capture relevant non-verbal behavior such as eye gaze, posture, gestures, and other context-relevant issues that would not otherwise be recoverable through the use of audio equipment alone. Using discourse analysis (Schiffrin, 1994; Chafe, 1994; Brown and Yule, 1983) as our primary methodological approach, we demonstrate just how and to what degree "place" influences communication among participants. Our approach to discourse analysis is based on the detailed, in-depth examination of spontaneous language use in interaction, with a particular emphasis on how language choice reflects speaker stance, understanding, and identity (Clark, 1996; Ochs, 1996: Goodwin, 1994). This type of systematic, micro-level attention to language has revealed a number of linguistic patterns in each setting which elucidate how the notions of time and space, hence "place," constrain communication and ultimately influence the process of learning. Phase I of this project focuses on the collaborative nature of planning and problem solving in each setting. By isolating the scope of inquiry to this particular activity type across two distinct learning environments, we are able to compare and contrast participants' use of language and determine with some degree of precision how "place" and its concomitant elements of space and time influence the ways in which this activity is interactively accomplished. Place and its Influence on Language In the data analyzed thus far, we find an inverse relationship between range of language use and spatio-temporal boundaries. That is, in the on-line cyberspace class, which is virtually free of delimited meeting times and meeting places, language use appears remarkably narrow and focused. On the other hand, in the face-to-face classroom setting, with actual physical partitions, configurational limitations of desks, chairs, black/white boards, etc., and pre-set temporal bounds, participants' use of language is broad, and virtually limitless. In essence, the existence or non-existence of spatio-temporal boundaries appears to significantly impact the ways in which participants communicate with each other, especially in the areas of planning and problem solving. For the purpose of the present paper, we will consider as a "plan" the set of activities or strategies that interactants engage in with a view to fulfill a particular course-related goal. Here, the goal could be a longer-term objective such as an explicit requirement noted in the syllabus, or it could be related to the resolution of some immediate problem that impedes or otherwise frustrates the accomplishment of a designated activity. Problems and potential problems in the on-line course are generally dealt with step by step in a highly systematic and sequential manner. The scope of the talk is confined to an immediate problem at hand that participants deal with using a limited range of linguistic markers and communicative strategies; procedural steps are explicitly delineated, and tense marking seems to focus largely on the future. Conversely, in the face-to-face setting, we find that participants tend to alternate freely through various topics and issues, including the appeal to past time narratives of personal experience, in an attempt to plan for future work as well as to resolve current and potential problems. The relevance of past-time narratives of personal experience to future events and future-time experience has been discussed at length in Ochs (1994). Example (1) below, excerpted from the first week of on-line interaction, represents a typical use of future tense marking by the instructor. These early communications tend to center on the instructor's plans and expectations for the course. In this and earlier postings, the instructor is continuou