It is impossible to overstate the importance of the introduction sections of the Sharing Cultures discussion boards in relation to student success in making connections with their peers across the globe gzsz folgen herunterladen. Successful introductions are necessary not only for the extended interactions that lead to achievement of both the “sharing” goals of the project but most interestingly the “learning about writing and language” goals of their respective classrooms download facebook lite for free. Because the students have no other means of attracting attention and response from other students other than the way they write themselves into the discussion board space, an understanding of how the writing works (or does not work) and what it does (or does not do) is crucial for an informed understanding of how learning might happen in internet mediated learning environment access 2007 handbuch download kostenlos.
The students who wrote successful introductions overwhelmingly approached the IMLE with a ludic as phatic lens, with 88% of the introductory posts that generated sustained discussion containing some combination of playful elements with written paralinguistic cues to make connections with other students cash system free download full version. Only 1% of the unsuccessful introductory posts analyzed, those that generated no response, contained some combination of those elements. Instead, the unsuccessful posts were earnest and self-focused microsoft powerpoint presentation for free. They were friendly and perfectly nice, but they did not give their readers any reason to give back; they did not contain the phatic discourse that enables open channels of communication hörbücher bei youtube downloaden.
The introductory phase of the IMLE activity might easily be characterized in a disparaging way, as small-talk often is, as focused on the “social nonsense” or even on “transgressive” material, but my analysis of the discussion board activity across five years of the Sharing Cultures project strongly suggests that this initial social, ludic-as-phatic phase is key to an IMLE in which the students are expected to learn from one another laruaville kostenlos downloaden. Engaged, interactive, extended discussions did not take place for the students who had not made connections with peers through the introductory phase customs receipt. The 66% of total students that participated in the student-generated discussions that followed the introductory posts in the Sharing Cultures IMLE are nearly identical with the 66% of total students that successfully forged discussion board relationships with other students patience gratis downloaden android. The discussion board activity of these students was characterized by high numbers of posts and comments across many student-generated discussions. The remaining 29% of student participants, after “unsuccessful” introductions and/or no attempts to reply to the introductory posts of their peers, limited their activity on the discussion board overall to direct responses to teacher prompts firefox herunterladen und installieren. The pattern of activity for these students was characterized by relatively few posts, depending upon how many teacher prompts the student encountered, and no comment activity on other student posts. In some cases, (5%), students never posted again after an unsuccessful introduction.
Levels of Student Engagement
In the context of global, online learning environments that hope to establish some kind of social learning exchange, then, the initial, social, “small-talk” exchanges between student participants should be included as key elements of curricular design. The ludic-as-phatic aspects of introductory conversations can and should be explored as powerful rhetorical tools for navigating social activity in IMLEs. Understanding these strategies appears to be of particular importance for getting relationships off the ground in large-scale teaching and learning spaces in which students are strangers and must work to forge social connections. Without the ludic-as-phatic writing strategies mediating the multiple layers of social network connections in an IMLE like Sharing Cultures, the discussion, the collaboration, the sharing, and therefore the peer-to-peer learning, simply does not happen.
