Strengths from limitations

The need for students to communicate in writing has often been cited as a positive feature of real-time conferencing pedagogy. This need is doubly evident in distance education, and it encourages the sharpening of skills on both students' and teachers' parts. Both are forced to articulate in writing in order to achieve goals--the teacher needs students to understand comments on drafts, for example, and students need to express their understanding or problems with writing tasks. Often, the expression fails and we need to try again, but in this ongoing pursuit of understanding the written transactions become part of the learning whole, to a degree they do not in traditional classes.