Real-Time Discussions (Chats and MOOs)

Real-time discussions generate ideas, help create a learning community in online classes, provide discussion transcripts, provide a means of online conferencing and collaboration, and get students writing. Discussion posts tend to be short, so students very often need to clarify and amend messages. They need to ask for clarifications and follow up, or they find ways to jump into someone else's argument and extend it or analyze it. Such discussions provide an instant audience, and a way to explore voice. Michael Day's "An Informal Rationale for Using Chats in the Composition Classroom" is a quick and interesting read on this topic.

Course tools have chat rooms, or you can use MOOs, wonderful programs that provide online learning environments. Several teachers have prepared excellent instructions and information on MOOs and MOOing. Two good resources for writing teachers are the Connections Home Page  and the LinguaMOO Home Page .

Real-Time Discussion Ideas

  1. Visit a MOO when you have the chance.
  2. Have a chat with your class. But before starting, have them write online in a discussion board post or simple editor like Notepad. Once in the chat, have them summarize what they wrote. This immediately shows them the difference between writing for 15 minutes or so on one's own and sharing one's thoughts with a group. Direct students to respond to one another in the chat. Record the session.
  3. Pause during a chat and have all your students stand up. Have them find a line they wrote, and tell them to all read out loud at once. This shows how in a chat, more people can speak during a class period than can in an oral discussion, where people need to take turns. (In MOOs you can create tools for turn-taking, presentations, slide shows, and so on.)
  4. Save the chat transcripts and have students start an essay by cutting and pasting statements from the chat into the file that they wrote in before the chat began.