Tatar, D., Gray, J., & Fusco, J. (2002) Rich Social Interaction in an Online Community for Learning. In Electronic Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Bloomington, CO.
Abstract
Synchronous online communities for learning have been criticized because participant contributions do not seem to build on each other. But decontextualized measures of building do not adequately characterize the nature of communication in successful real-time interaction. Other factors, such as whether the participants understand the meaning of remarks, the light in which they are presented, and the joint project the group is engaged in may ultimately prove to be more directly related to characterizing the community and its learning prospects. This paper starts the process of thinking about these more subtle indicators in the context of one example from a session in Tapped In.