Characteristics of Computer Classrooms
Overriding the importance of the features of individual situations, three
characteristics mark the computer learning environment. As will become
increasingly evident to the reader of the studies which follow, these
characteristics frame each contribution’s discussion. The first feature praised
in every chapter is the positive student affect that seems to result from
networking—the enthusiastic student response to networking activities.
This enthusiasm exists even in classes where exchanges have at times been
confrontational. Indeed, depending on the assignment and classroom
demographics, irate or even homophobic, insensitive remarks are not
uncommon in networking exchanges. Judgemental statements, however,
in the experience of the authors of these essays, often prove to be the basis
for committed engagement, lively discussion, and elaborated reactions that
lead to more positive, less prejudicial views.
A second feature emphasized, having time to reflect about exchanges
prior to participating in them, may explain why students enjoy networking
more than conventional classroom conversation. Each chapter discovers
independently that an oral classroom setting poses affective difficulties and
frustrations for students because they find themselves unable to express
their ideas as adequately in an unfamiliar idiom, register, or language as
they can in their own idiolect or native language. That problem seems to
be alleviated, however, in a networked classroom, through the expedient of
enabling individual students to monitor before writing—to exploit a window
of time and focus to gather their thoughts and linguistic abilities in order
to produce successful communication. Unlike the demands for instant
response inherent in verbal exchanges in oral classes, written exchanges
allow time to reconsider, time to scroll down the screen and see what others
have written, time to review notes or assignments brought with them to
the networking class. And conversely, the computer enables immediate
feedback, without the delays inherent in written feedback in the traditional
classroom.
The third shared feature of computer network learning also relates to
the preceding two: praise for reduced “teacher talk,” resulting in greater
participation among students than is characteristic in the oral classroom.
Instructors no longer control 70 percent of the classroom “air time” in a
networking classroom. Not only is access in terms of raw time or dominance
4 Janet Swaffar
at issue here. Often, a prime inhibitor of student engagement is a perceived
ability gap between oneself and the linguistic capability of most instructors
or fellow students. A particular type of spoken proficiency is a key to
dominance in an oral classroom. Small wonder, then, that isolated fluent
students and the teacher’s instructional language skills tend to dominate
oral classroom discourse. Networking classes eliminate this spoken
proficiency advantage, and hence they also eliminate both the individualstudent
and the teacher-dominance pattern—in effect they filter out societal
roles that help a forceful personality to dominate as well. On the network,
because affective tricks must be encoded in writing, they are less likely to
convey an emotional charge.
Thus computers minimize differences simply because a computer screen
displays all entries in a single presentation format (same fonts, typescripts).
Moreover, all entries appear in the order sent and are received in “natural”
sequence, not stage-managed by a teacher or reconstructed from memory.
Students can scroll and select entries to focus on at will. The choice is
theirs.
While the instructor’s linguistic command remains superior to that of
the class, its affective power is reduced to being one of many, a democratizing
visual perception. Without acoustic power and body language to reinforce
messages, the instructor or the more fluent fellow-student becomes one
among many. Such discursive equality empowers the class as a whole because
the resulting atmosphere is one in which all students have an even playing
field on which to express themselves—a field where sociolinguistic
competence exceeds personal power.
Positive affect, reduced frustration, and sheer quantity of articulation
may, nonetheless, be illusory empowerment. Unless students are learning
to express themselves with increasing effectiveness (including articulateness,
correctness), sheer quantity of verbiage is an insufficient measure for
progress. Not only must the quantity of student production in a computer
network be greater to validate it as a unique learning environment, but the
quality of this production must also be. To forestall such objections, each
chapter in this volume illustrates a particular aspect of the network learning
environment that supports claims made here about the cognitive and
linguistic benefits to be found in networking. The section that follows
attempts to explain this phenomenon in overview: why students seem to
be engaging in a particularly valuable learning mode when communicating
in a networked classroom.