A New Direction
Since this course was offered in Spring 1997, a number of teachers at Ball State have begun to use FirstClass Collaborative Classroom® (FC), an intranet system, available on and off campus via the Internet, that supports several modes of communications and group interactions with text.
FirstClass® has begun to help us address several of the challenges I've outlined. It has
- Simplified a good deal the process students go
through for sending messages
and texts to classmates and instructors; FC uses a
Windows-type interface that uses skills students already
have for basic task management.
- Made text transfer much simpler and more
intuitive, thus broadening the communications range substantially; students can not only engage in
asynchronous mail and synchronous chat, but they can
respond to each others' writings within posted texts,
creating a field of audience response in the original
texts.
- Allowed teachers some powerful tools to organize and guide on-line learning, thus
lightening the "communications burden";
teachers can set up separate discussion or peer response
groups; can send messages or texts to all, several, or to
groups of students; can make dynamic links from within FC
to the World Wide Web; can include multi-media modes
(graphics, sound, and motion video).
- Narrowed the skills gap between students.
While the principles of transactional reading/writing theory and pedagogy remain unchanged, and the relatively narrow bandwidth of on-line teaching is still a fact, an environment such as FirstClass allows us to focus more steadily on learning goals and worry less about technological distractions. FC will provide a more promising base environment for future research and development of on-line pedagogy.