The Shared Discourse of the Networked Computer Classroom

By L. Lennie Irvin

Published in the May, 1999 journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College
Republished in Trends & Issues in English Studies: 2000. NCTE.

            “It’s the network,”  I recall Fred Kemp stressing at a workshop for computer classroom teachers at my school.  To demonstrate what computer networks facilitate, Kemp (a pioneer in the theory and practice of teaching writing in the computer classroom) showed us two diagrams depicting what he called “the discourse authority” in a classroom.   By “discourse authority,” he meant the control and possession of truth and knowledge for the communication in a learning setting.  The diagram for the “traditional classroom” (or as he called it, “the proscenium classroom”) presented the teacher in front and the students in neat rows below.  Each of the lines representing this discourse authority went through the teacher.  In contrast, the diagram for the computer classroom showed a room with computers around the outer walls, and these lines forming a complex maze of interconnection resembling an airline carrier’s route map.   Lines of discourse no longer went through just the teacher, but zipped between students.  What Kemp was trying to show us was the increased interactivity, or shared discourse, in a networked computer classroom environment, as well as the decentered nature of the environment.

                I assumed that the discourse Kemp described was the discourse of real-time synchronous electronic conferencing.  The “achieved utopia of the networked classroom,” as Lester Faigley refers to it, I believed was a synchronous conferencing utopia where students communicate with each other in dynamic ways.  Indeed, much of the hype and literature about the computer classroom has focused on synchronous writing (in The Daedalus Writing Environment this activity is called “Interchange,” in Norton Connect it is called “Group Discussion,” and for web-based software it is called “chat” or MOOs).  However, I recently had a revelation which expanded my understanding of the dynamics of the “talk” and learning that occur in the networked computer classroom.  I began to look closely at the assignments I had my students do, and I realized that shared discourse in the networked computer classroom has three levels, one of which is synchronous writing.  These levels form a continuum of interactivity from students sending messages "AT" each other, to students sending messages "TO" each other, to students sending messages "BETWEEN" each other.  I believe it is helpful as teachers in the networked computer classroom environment to understand the distinct characteristics of these three levels so that we are better able to manage this discourse and extend it.

The "AT" Level of Shared Discourse
In this level, students send a message "at" the whole group.  In the traditional classroom, this sharing of text is equivalent to setting the class in a circle and having each person read their piece of writing aloud to the group.  This type of discourse is usually accomplished by sending an e-mail message to the group (asynchronous writing), but students could send messages “at” each other by putting a document in a common class file accessible to all or within a synchronous electronic conference.  Everyone reads aloud; everyone listens (or in the case of the computer classroom, everyone writes and everyone reads).  The greatest value in this discourse for the student is comparability.  Students learn as they read not only through exposure to new bits of knowledge, but by comparing their message with the other messages in the group.  They also learn by comparing the messages of their peers with each other.  Students assemble the knowledge by their own action and at their own pace, which gives them more ownership of the knowledge.  Also, they can open (read) the message as often as they wish.  As a result, the socialization to knowledge and to the norms of discourse happens more easily and more readily by this means than any other, I believe.

            In addition, the “at” level of shared discourse takes advantage of some of the strengths of the networked computer classroom, while avoiding some of the negatives.  Faigley in his chapter on the computer classroom uses some of Bakhtin’s ideas to describe the dynamics of the computer classroom.   Faigley describes the traditional classroom as “monologic” and possessing the “centripetal forces of unity, authority and truth” (183).  What he means is that the teacher is the sole arbiter, possessor and communicator of knowledge--the teacher’s “narrative” is pre-eminent.  In contrast, the computer classroom is “dialogic” and contains “centrifugal forces of multiplicity, equality, and uncertainty” (183).  These dialogic characteristics are what get so many people excited about the computer classroom--everyone talks (or writes), everyone has an equal voice, and the infallible authority of the teacher is decentered because students learn from each other, not just the teacher.  However, when teachers experience what Faigley describes as the lack of closure, the breakdown of the teacher’s metanarrative which gives coherence to the learning environment, and the confrontational dynamic inherent in real-time synchronous conferences, they may agree with him that it is “post-modern,” but they may not see its pedagogical value.  The “at” level of discourse allows more easily for the traditional classroom discourse of “initiation-reply-evaluation.”  The teacher can still initiate the discussion to which the students send an e-mail response.  All the students read each other’s messages (thereby taking advantage of the capacity for multiplicity, equality, and comparability), and then the teacher can select some responses to go over together with the group if he or she wishes (thereby reaching evaluation and some sense of closure).  As a hybrid between the “monologic” and the “dialogic,” this “at” discourse enables the teacher to maintain more control of the learning goals and standards of the course (unity, authority, and truth).  Although less glamorous, less dynamic, and less “post-modern,” the “at” level of discourse is pedagogically very useful and does not deserve the little attention it has gotten.

Examples of "AT" Level Shared Discourse
(1) Early in the semester in my Composition I classes, I have my students write a ten minute freewriting journal dealing with their attitudes about writing.  They are to imagine the figure which embodies what makes writing difficult for them, describe this figure (called the Watcher), and write it a letter.  Students send the journal via e-mail to the whole class, and then read the journals of their peers (In Daedalus, all mail messages show up on a common mail conference, something like a Newsgroup).  This exercise contributes a lot to the shared knowledge and experience of the group.  Students see that having difficulties with writing is not uncommon and that others may experience the same problems they do.  As a creative piece of writing, the students also see examples of creative expressions and approaches to this topic.  (2) I  also have my students work on descriptive techniques early in the course.  As they try out some of these techniques (such as using more descriptive verbs, using comparisons, or incorporating sensory images), the "at" level of discourse can be a valuable tool for helping them learn this style of writing.  For instance, we practice "showing and not telling" by taking a "telling" phrase that is general and opening it up with "showing."  We might take a sentence like, "The child was upset," and each send a mail message with our version of opening up that sentence.  Students also learn how to make judgments through this type of sharing:  in this case, they distinguish between those who have done well at opening up with description and those who haven't. Commonly, I will also have the class open a message at a time, have the author read it aloud, and then together point to good examples of descriptive techniques.  This same approach for using the mail would work for teaching other writing features or techniques as well.  (3) I have also used the "at" level of discourse in the early stages of a synchronous conference.  For one of my classes, we had an assignment on the topic of stereotypes, and before class students read two essays which dealt with this general theme.  For their initial message, students included one or two quotes from the reading which they felt were significant and related to the theme.  For the second message, students shared one experience they had confronting a stereotype.  These "at" messages highlighted significant points from the text and helped to generated some "between" discourse in the group.  After this synchronous discussion, I introduced students to the paper topic on stereotypes, so this exercise broadened their understanding of the topic and the texts and helped them see possibilities for the specific topic of their paper.

The "TO" Level of Shared Discourse

            In this level of discourse, students direct a message to a specific person in the group.  It is like a letter which is addressed and sent by the regular mail.  Usually, this type of discourse has a clearer purpose and a more defined audience.  In this way, the "to" level is rhetorically more sophisticated.  E-mail is the most obvious place for this "to" discourse, but it also occurs in peer review (called “Respond” in Daedalus) and can be in synchronous conferences.  With the "to" act of discourse, students many times--but not always--implement  judgments and knowledge they have gained, since these messages may contain peer comments or evaluations.

            One other characteristic of discourse in the networked computer classroom in general, but which seems to express itself more in the “to” level of discourse, is objectivity for the students.  Since the students are not facing their audience in person, and they are not even sure when the addressee will read their message, they experience a kind of distance from their audience which allows them to be more objective and honest in their discourse.  Linda Aldler-Kassner and Thomas Reynolds in an article about using the computer classroom to enhance students’ reading ability called this environment a “safe place”:  “We’ve found that students tend to disclose more about their interaction with reading over e-mail than they do in the classroom” (174).  This confirms my own assessment of peer response in the computer classroom.  Comparing peer response in the traditional classroom to that in the computer classroom, I found that students in the computer environment put 32% more content into their responses.  In addition, I noted a qualitative superiority to the responses from the computer classroom (Irvin 3).  Kassner and Reynolds state that “the anonymity of e-mail (although students are aware that their names are attached to their posts) seems to provide this student with the kind of distance from instructor and classmates that she needed to write an honest assessment of her reading” (174).  This distance, coupled with the power and confidence computers encourage in students, seems to help students write more and better responses “to” each other.

Examples of "TO" Level of Shared Discourse
        (1) Peer response represents the most prevalent "to" discourse in the computer composition class.  However this peer response is done (and in Daedalus there are at least five different ways),  students most often answer a number of prepared questions which call on them to put into practice knowledge they have learned in the course by making observations, judgments and recommendations about their peer's writing.  These comments are then sent to the author via e-mail or other means. (2) Another example of "to" discourse I have used (with the Daedalus software) involves students refining a tentative thesis.  Before this exercise, the class should have covered some characteristics of what makes a good thesis statement, and students should arrive to class with a tentative thesis in mind.  Using the Mail, students send their thesis statement in an initial message.  Working in groups of five to seven, students respond "to" each peer by critiquing the thesis and then offering a revised version.  This revised version can simply be a restatement of the thesis using different language than the original or a refining of the ideas expressed.  After this first flurry of "to" messages, each author reads his or her mail and sends a new mail message with a revised version of the thesis.  If more refining is needed, and time allows, this same sequence can be repeated.  I have used this exercise with developmental students and been amazed at how good they are at responding to each other and how well this exercise gets across the idea of what makes a good thesis. (3)  One of the great values of the computer is its ability to enhance role playing for students.  In this exercise,  students are paired on separate sides of an issue (one smokes and the other doesn't, one believes same sex marriages are ok and one doesn't) and then told to write a persuasive piece to sway their peer over to their opinion. In this way students put on a "rhetorical mask" to explore aspects of audience and purpose.     The assignment could almost be anything, but the point is to make the rhetorical situation of audience and purpose as defined and immediate as possible (even if the rhetorical situation is fictitious--i.e. students put on a pose).  The exercise could involve a single mail messages “to” each other, or it could jump into a back and forth debate.

The "BETWEEN" Level of Shared Discourse
This is the discourse which people who have gotten involved in the networked computer classroom get the most excited about.  Real-time synchronous electronic conferencing (called Interchange in Daedalus) is the primary place for this type of discourse where students dialogue back and forth between each other.  Out of the crucible of discourse, meaning forms, explodes, and takes shape again.  It is at once "at" discourse because students send messages which are read by all the group, and it is "to" discourse because frequently students direct comments to each other, but the dynamic is continued into exchange.  Students feel a real sense of audience in this environment because the rest of the class is reading and can respond immediately.  In addition, synchronous discussions have received a lot of positive attention for their qualities of “multiplicity” and “equality”:  more students get involved in the discussion and each has an equal “voice” since all messages appear in the same way on the computer screen.  I always think of synchronous electronic conferences as a class discussion (like in the traditional classroom), except every student is able to speak at once, students tend to write more, and I (as teacher) cannot lead and orchestrate the discussion to the degree done in the traditional classroom (i.e. initiation-reply-evaluation).  Students also engage more with each other rather than directing their discourse toward me, as students do when they look at the teacher in the traditional classroom.

            While some of the features of this type of discourse noted earlier may be negatives (such as the lack of closure, the decentering of authority away from the teacher, the confrontational dynamics, and the movement away from “Truth” to uncertainty), they are also this type of discourse’s strengths.  As Faigley points out after his students had finished a synchronous discussion: “By the end of this section we see a reversal of roles, with the teacher replying and students making evaluative comments. ... The paradox is that the class discussion has gone much farther and much faster than it could have with [the teacher] standing in front” (181).  Students are lead to make conclusions and evaluations on their own, rather than the teacher making them for the students.  The “between” discourse may be the most glamorous and interesting to teachers, but it is also the one which teachers need to enter into with the most care and intent so that the conversation does not descend into trivialities or name calling.

Examples of "Between" Level of Discourse
(1)  Synchronous electronic conferencing is excellent for class discussion over readings or over a general subject which could be used for a paper topic.  In a literature class, students could debate various interpretations of a piece of literature.  In a more creative vein, students can assume pseudonyms and take on the persona of various characters in a story and then debate various interpretations of the literature.  Most often, I use synchronous discussions as a form of prewriting to broaden my students' understanding of a general topic for a paper assignment.  They share each of their perspectives on the topic and then dialogue and debate back and forth. (2)  Synchronous writing and the "between" discourse can be used by small groups also to negotiate meaning.  One of my colleagues frequently has his classes work in small groups to construct collaborative essays in competition.  These groups figure out how they will work and what they will write by dialoguing in a synchronous conference.  Creating these multiple synchronous conferences is easily done in Daedalus and Norton, but without these software packages a teacher could accomplish the same thing by taking students to a MOO and letting each group dialogue in different rooms.  (3) I have also used synchronous conferencing for peer response to try and simulate the kind of discussion that happens in small peer groups in the traditional classrooms.  Usually, students first send an "at" message which is an initial response to the essay, and then they discuss between each other about the essay.

Extending the Shared Discourse
            What becomes really exciting is when the shared discourse, and thus the social knowledge of the group, gets extended.  This extension occurs as a repeated sequence of invention, reflection, and reinvention. 

            In the case of my Watcher example (where students imagined the being which makes writing difficult for them), the students at this point have done two of these acts--invention, the initial expression in the mail message; and reflection, reading all the messages of their peers.  The act of reading and reflecting upon the multiplicity of views inevitably causes the students to expand their ideas.  From here, I have students work in groups to reformulate these ideas by creating a collage on the Watcher from pieces of their peers’ mail messages (which is easily done by cutting and pasting from the e-mail messages).  This new expression--this reinvention--in turn can be posted for all the students in the class to read for a second act of reflection.  The students could then be asked to reinvent their ideas again by writing a letter to prospective students about the most common anxieties and difficulties experienced by novice writers. 

            Extending the shared discourse is like a house of mirrors, with each act of reflection leading to a new act of invention and learning which leads to more reflection.  For example, a typical way of extending the shared discourse might come after a synchronous conferencing session.  One of the critiques of synchronous sessions is the lack of coherence and closure.  To coalesce some points of meaning and importance, the teacher might ask the students to review the transcript of a synchronous discussion they have just done and then pick out three important points or write some conclusion they have discovered from the discussion.  These new pieces of writing can then in turn be posted as e-mail messages or messages in a synchronous conference and read by the class.

            Paolo Freire in his essay “The Banking Concept of Education” captures the possibilities when this shared discourse is extended: “Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (213).  Students’ learning and expression grows as the discourse is extended; however, managing this extended discourse, encouraging it, fostering it, setting it in motion takes a great deal of preparation, as well as tasks and topics which move the students naturally down the slope of interacting with and learning from each other. 

The Last Word
            How a teacher uses a networked computer classroom is inextricably connected to his or her notions of how people learn to write.  David McConnell in his 1994 book Implemention Computer Supported Cooperative Learning expresses the main premise for teachers using the collaborative or constructivist approach: “The major message of this book is that people learn best when they have the opportunity to work with other people, through processes of cooperation and collaboration” (158).  And he warns that without an underlying educational philosophy which emphasizes the  importance of cooperation, no computer Supported Cooperative Learning system will in itself be effective. CSCL media offer an environment for such activities.  It is the people using them that have to believe in the activities  and ensure that they occur” (158).  We are faced today, especially in many Community Colleges, with a significant number of teachers who are not using the unique capabilities that computer networks enable for teaching writing--text sharing and collaboration--because they have not adopted new approaches to teaching writing.  Todd Oppenheimer in his July 1997 Atlantic article, “The Computer Delusion: Cutting other school subjects to make room for computers may be educational malpractice,” points to what we might even call a crisis in “constructivist” computer use in English education today:

as successive rounds of new [educational] technology failed their promoters’expectations, a pattern emerged.  The cycle began with big promises backed by the technology developers’ research.  In the classroom, however,               teachers never really embraced the new tools, and no significant academic improvement occurred” (46). 

In many schools, the majority of teachers still use the computer classrooms predominantly for word processing.  Now with the advent of the Internet, the computer classroom can be used as a surrogate library.   They haven’t embraced pedagogies which fully put these new tools to good use.  In a 1992 Computers and Composition article, Fred Kemp described the problem we are still faced with today:

The principal use for computers in English departments [other than CAI] remains word processing, and yet a room full of computer can do an awful lot more for instructors and students than simply provide high-powered writing tools.  The problem is the effective computer-based pedagogies often require a considerable shift in thinking from traditional thinking, a shift so great that most instructors cannot, intuitively, imagine useful instructional purposes for computers aside from word processing... . But to use ... computers only for word processing wastes money and equipment and instructional possibilities (Kemp 15).

Without embracing new teaching practices and approaches, the true potential of teaching writing with computers will not be fulfilled, nor will the great expenditure on these computer classrooms be justified. 

            I believe that a close examination of the shared discourse (AT, TO and BETWEEN) in the networked computer classroom reveals many of the possibilities of this teaching environment.  Understanding the characteristics of the “talk” in the networked computer classroom can help teachers design and fuel this complex and exciting learning environment.

                        Works Cited

Adler-Kassner, Linda and Reynolds. “Computers, Reading, and Basic Writers: Online Strategies for Helping Students with Academic Texts.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 23 (1996): 170-176.

Faigley, Lester.  Fragments of Rationality:  Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition.  University of Pittsburg Press, 1992.

Freire, Paolo.  "The Banking Concept of Education."  Ways of Reading.   Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky.  4th ed.  Boston: Bedford Books, 1996.  212-27.

Irvin, Lennie.  the Mouse &Key:  A Newsletter Devoted to Helping Teachers Teach in the Computer Classroom 1 (1996):3.

Kemp, Fred.  ""Who Programmed This? Examining the Instructional Attitudes of Writing-Support Software."  Computers and

     Composition  (1992): 9-24.

McConnell, David.  Implementing Computer Supported CooperativeLearning.  London: Kogan Page Ltd., 1994.

Oppenheimer, Todd.  "The Computer Delusion."  The Atlantic Monthly . July 1997: 45-62.