What Writing Students Get From the Net: Using Synchronous Communication to Develop Writerly Skills

The Gendered Language Chat Experiments

When we have class in the chatroom, we do not meet together in one room. Instead, students log on from a variety of sites (usually their dorm rooms or a lab), while I remain in my office. Chat classes last about 45 minutes; that's about all the eye and brain can take, especially the first time. These classes take place over a period of about 2 weeks, rather than three consecutive classes, and give students a chance to further refine and test the ideas they have developed in response to the writing assignment. This chart gives the details of each of the three chat classes.
 
Chat One
  • Students were randomly pre-assigned a color code name (e.g. Pink, Brown, Yellow) for the chat via e-mail and instructed to keep their code names secret.
  • Once students had logged on and were ready to begin class, they were asked to make a note any time they believed they had identified a classmate’s gender, indicating both whom they had identified and what gave him/her away.
  • Students discussed Rosenthal's "Gender Benders" and other gender-related issues introduced by the instructor (e.g. Is Barbie a negative influence on gender equality?).
  • At the end of the class (after about 40 minutes of chatting), students were asked to reveal their gender guesses.
  • Students who were identified as either male or female were then asked to confirm that identification.
  • See Results.
Chat Two
  • Students were randomly pre-assigned a gendered animal name (e.g. hen, rooster, doe, buck).
  • As before, students were asked to try to identify their classmates' gender during the discussion, as well as what gave him/her away.
  • Students discussed articles unrelated to gender but related to networked communication in general (selections from Imagologies by Esa Saarinen and Mark C. Taylor).
  • See Results.
Chat Three
  • Students chose their own code name and emailed it to their instructor for approval.
  • Code names were to be "a favorite literary character."
  • Students were given the option of choosing a code name that did not match their “real life” gender.
  • Students were encouraged to try to trick their classmates during discussion, which could mean a variety of things. For example, a female student might log on with a male character name and then "act" female. Or a male student might log on with a male name and then "act" female.
  • See Results.

 
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