Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

Taking Philosophical Dialogue Online

Author: Annamaria Carusi

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN:

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 3

Number: 1

Start page: 95

End page: 156

Return to vol. 3 no. 1 index page

Introduction

On-line learning technologies did not emerge organically from within educational contexts and we may feel something akin to xenophobic suspicion towards them. But then neither did paper and pen, or any of the other technologies that have since come to be assimilated into educational environments so wholly that they are now experienced as entirely natural; there should be little doubt that online technologies will follow suit. It should be recalled that Plato was suspicious of writing, but that he could only express that suspicion in a literate culture. However, at the moment, using on-line learning technologies does not come naturally and requires effort. Opinion may be split on whether the effort is worthwhile, but at the very least, this has forced some reflection on teaching practices.

The aim of this project is to explore whether the new technologies are useful for teaching philosophy. However, I have not rehearsed the entire panoply of possibilities ranging from noticeboards, to multimedia with all the bells and whistles, though no doubt there are many other useful and interesting purposes to which the technology may be put. Neither have I discussed the technical aspects of online environments, but have taken for granted a knowledge of the basic functioning of the facilities and tools that are incorporated into most Virtual Learning Environments that have been or are being introduced in UK universities. I have instead been more concerned to show how these can be put to use once the technical know-how is dealt with. In this study I have focused on two uses of online technologies: student-led discussion and document-centred discussion. These seem to me to draw upon a cluster of the most potentially exciting features of the technology for teaching of any type, and particularly for the teaching of an eminently discursive discipline such as philosophy. The features in question are (1) collaboration, (2) interactivity and (3) the oral-written discursive medium of computer-mediated discussions. Before discussing these features at greater length, I begin with a discussion of the pedagogy that informs online learning in a general way, in order later to draw out those factors which appear to be central for the teaching of philosophy in particular. This theoretical section thus focuses on putting forward some of the reasons why it may make good sense to avail ourselves of these technologies as teachers of philosophy; it is followed by a more practical section in which the practicalities of using the technologies are outlined.

1. The pedagogy that informs online learning

In this section, I consider three aspects of educational theory that are of particular relevance to online learning and teaching: constructivist educational theory; the development of higher-level cognitive abilities; and the representational and mediated character of academic knowledge.

1.1 Constructivism

The term that seems to recur most often in the literature on online learning technologies seems to be ‘constructivism’. In fact, it would often appear that the fact that online learning technologies lend themselves to constructivist educational principles is sufficient to make them desirable. Indeed the World Wide Web and the knowledge economy in which it thrives seem to be particularly amenable to a constructivist epistemology, and the rise of this particular catch-word both in educational theories and in analyses of emerging working practices may be symptomatic of the wider social and cultural environment. A constructivist epistemology is based on the view that objects of knowledge are generated, produced or created as constructs of processes of knowledge (ranging from cognitive processes, to discursive, social and institutional practices) rather than being antecedently existing objects that are grasped or discovered through learning. In particular, it sees knowledge as emerging from the ‘meaning-making’ nature of human beings, and as being a matter of human beings’ attempts to make meaning or interpret their experiences. This activity of interpretation and re-interpretation of experiences is communal or collaborationist in many significant respects, and thus there will sometimes be talk of knowledge as negotiated by communities. The tentative, unstable and provisional nature of knowledge is stressed. Constructivism is often closer to a social epistemology than to traditional epistemology, and indeed is generally contrasted with the empiricist-rationalist epistemological tradition. As philosophers, we may or may not be persuaded by a constructivist epistemology, but it is important to distinguish between this as a philosophical theory and as an educational theory, even though there is a great deal of overlap in their terminology and general outlook. Whereas some constructivists see the learning process they describe as constitutive of knowledge, it is quite possible to take on board the description of the learning process without making any further epistemological commitments.

Constructivism in educational theory is contrasted to behaviourist-empiricist models of learning, or, models which are objectivist or proceduralist. These latter are models in which knowledge is seen as external to learners, and learners as passive absorbers thereof. Teaching is teacher-centred, and tends to be uni-directional, flowing from the teacher to the learner, and paying scant attention to individual learning styles. Obviously this is not a teaching model which finds much favour in current educational theory, and even those who are unversed in educational theory generally know enough at least to try to avoid it. Constructivism has emerged as the prime opponent to this view, although it is by now far from being a marginal competitor, having now taken over as the hegemonic view. Initially developed from the theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, statements and definitions of constructivism vary, but all are based on the idea that knowledge is not external to learners, and is not passively absorbed by learners. The following two tenets convey the most important constructivist principles:

  1. learning is an active process of constructing rather than acquiring knowledge, and
  2. instruction is a process of supporting that construction rather than communicating knowledge. (Duffy & Cunningham, quoted in Laurillard 2002:67)

The term ‘constructivist’ may suggest that knowledge is conceived as being internal to the learning process to the extent that there is no external standard for it. Even though the rhetoric sometimes masks this, this need not be the case. Burge, for example, includes in her list of the roles of the constructivist teacher those of ‘confirm[ing] the learning identified by learners, and guid[ing] learners to generate correct solutions’ (1995:156). The key-word is active, a process of learning by doing, which is, it seems to me, particularly appropriate for philosophy.

 

The following is a summary of the principles of constructivist teaching which I have quoted at length, since it puts forward several sound principals for the teaching of philosophy:

Three points need to be highlighted: the first is the fact that one of the central processes of knowledge construction is that of describing and interpreting experience; in fact, even more central to this is a view of learning as being a process of appropriating and manipulating representational systems (a point to which I return in the next section). Hence an important role of the teacher is to facilitate descriptions and re-descriptions of the learning material. The second is the fact that the constructivist approach is also a collaborativist one. The fact that the constructivist approach to teaching is learner-centred rather than teacher-centred means that the teacher is a facilitator rather than an authority on the subject matter. Of course, the teacher is an authority, or at least this is to be hoped, but the focus of teaching is shifted from getting the students to align their knowledge with that of the teacher and rather to come to come to know ‘by his or her own light’ (and so to internalise the ideals of the Enlightenment!). The constructivist paradigm that has emerged—in particular with the more socially oriented constructivism of Vygotsky—sees this as being greatly enhanced by collaborating with peers, in dialogues and discussions, rather than as being induced by the lone individual reflecting upon his or her own thoughts. By having to carve out and formulate a position of their own among those of others—none of whom is an authority—students are encouraged ‘to be responsible for the concepts they construct, the beliefs they hold, and the arguments they formulate and defend’ (Bach & Manion 2001:48). The third is the fact that this collaboration has—and indeed thrives on—an inherent disequilibrium: trial, error and opposition, something which is inherent to the processes which go to building up and testing philosophical arguments.

The centrality of collaboration to the constructivist paradigm generally and active learning in particular is stressed by several researchers1. There is a collaborative learning situation if peers are (i) more-or-less at the same level and can perform the same actions; (ii) have a common goal, and (iii) work together in such a way as to trigger learning mechanisms (Dillenbourg 1999). On one view of collaboration, it is beneficial simply because it encourages active participation: instead of a uni-directional teaching process from teacher to student, there are multi-directional interactions between participants, each of whom is responsible for their contribution. This seems to be most in line with the idea of knowledge emerging from learning rather than being imposed on it: ‘Knowledge according to this view is something that emerges through active dialogue, by formulating ideas into words and building ideas and concepts through the reactions and responses of others to these formulations’ (Harasim 2001:52). There is, however, no reason to believe that collaboration per se triggers learning mechanisms. Collaborations need to be carefully designed and monitored in order to have the desired effects. In particular, the role of conflict in collaboration is interesting.

Collaboration with peers is particularly important in de-centering the teacher as authority. On the Piagetian model of pedagogy, the conflicting perspectives that emerge in collaborations are seen as having a productive role. It is claimed that young children do not test adults’ ideas as they do those of their peers (Littleton & Häkkinen 1999:23). Disagreements with other children highlight alternatives to the child’s own point of view which can be considered on an equal footing. In addition, if a resolution of conflict of opinion is necessitated, children can be prodded towards higher-level solutions. For example, in a study of the role of conflict in learning, it was found that children playing Mastermind in teams fared better than those playing alone; and pairs who argued more did better than those who argued less. Thus disagreement complemented by the need for justification to one’s peers, with a specific goal, seems to be particularly efficacious. On Vygotsky’s constructivist model, in which learning is seen as being a fundamentally social developmental process, collaboration is seen as similarly important. Interpersonal processes become the model for intra-personal processes; thus ‘discussion, interaction and argument become internalised as the basis for reflection and logical reasoning’ (Vygotsky, quoted in Littleton & Häkkinen 1999:24).

Dillenbourg (1999:13) further points out that collaborative interactions are useful for learning in particular where there is space for negotiation. This is inhibited where the subject matter is semantically obvious or unambiguous, and leaves nothing to be disagreed upon. Where there is space for negotiation, participants can argue for their standpoint, justify, and attempt to convince others. In addition, where there is space for negotiation, there is also space for misunderstanding, and when participants misunderstand each other, they have to explain themselves, reformulate statements and so on. These are the kinds of activities that lead to learning, and will be of interest to teachers of philosophy in particular. The fact that structured academic controversies have several beneficial results, both cognitive and social is well-supported; among these benefits are:

This impressive array of benefits does not, however, come without effort, and while online resources are particularly geared towards collaboration, online collaborative projects need to be especially well-monitored and well-structured. However, it is, I hope, obvious that the collaborative dimension is extremely important in achieving active learning, and is an essential component of constructivist teaching methodology.

1.2 Higher-level cognitive skills

There are, thus, several ways in which constructivist-collaborativist principles develop what we recognise as being the type of philosophical virtues that philosophy teachers try to encourage in their students. In a narrower sense, in effect, what we are looking for are any resources that help to develop higher-level cognitive skills. The TELRI project based at the University of Warwick, identifies the skills that are needed in order to encourage research-based learning and teaching, on the premise that these are the very same skills that differentiate between students who cope and those who excel. Apart from the ability to be innovative, to work independently, to set and solve problems, research requires well-developed higher-order cognitive skills. These include the abilities to:

These skills are the basis for adaptive rather than adoptive learning: that is, generative rather than reproductive learning. Whereas adoptive learning is tied to particular problems and situations, adaptive learning has an in-built transferability to a wide range of problems and situations (though not necessarily across disciplines). For our purposes, a generalised ability to ‘think philosophically’ across a wide range of problems, would be an instance of adaptive learning.

Another way of characterising higher-level cognitive skills is by reference to the so-called SOLO taxonomy, developed by Biggs and Collis2, to map out the degrees of increasing structural complexity through which learning occurs. They differentiate between five levels of learning response: prestructural (irrelevant or incorrect); unistructural (one relevant aspect); multistructural (several relevant independent aspects); relational (several relevant and integrated aspects); and extended abstract (high level of abstract thinking, generalisation). It is only from the relational level upwards that higher level cognitive skills come into play. These levels are further distinguished according to how well they are instantiated in learning, that is, with what degree of cognitive complexity.

Relational (a) & (b): The most basic level of relational understanding–‘Relational (a)’–is a ‘compare and contrast’ response. Biggs (1999:48) refers to this as declarative understanding, which is the ability to use a concept to integrate a collection of data. ‘Relational (b)’ is a more complex or higher level of relational response and is reflected by the ability to apply a concept to a familiar data set or problem. Biggs (1999) calls this functional understanding.

Extended Abstract (a) & (b): Here students’ responses are characterised by a high level of abstract thinking, originality, or generalisation, and going beyond what is given or expected; for example, the ability to theorise, generalise, hypothesise, and reflect (Biggs, 1999:48). The SOLO tag ‘extended abstract (a)’ represents learning responses that demonstrate the ability to relate content to existing principles; whereas the ‘extended abstract (b)’ SOLO tag represents responses involving questioning and going beyond existing principles. (Whittle, Morgan & Maltby 2000)

The difference between the (a) and (b) levels in both instances seems to reside in the difference between using a concept or principle correctly, and reflecting on the concept or principle used. Philosophical skills are concentrated in the (b) levels of both the relational and extended abstract levels of thinking, as philosophical subject-matter is most often itself a matter of reflecting on available concepts and principles. There is little by way of declarative knowledge that a student can rely on—and even when there is, the way it is expressed says much about the extent to which it is understood.

These higher-level cognitive skills are the very ones that constructivist teaching methodology aims to develop, which makes it particularly apt for the teaching of philosophy. Since it is claimed that online resources are particularly conducive to constructivist principles, it is fairly safe to conclude that they will also be valuable for the teaching of philosophy. The question is whether the benefits of online resources are really worth the trouble they take in setting up and maintaining them, as there are, of course, many different ways of going about teaching in a generally constructivist way.

Online learning resources are particularly suited to constructivist teaching principles, and this is often taken to be in itself an encouragement for using them3. They allow for a de-centred, non-authoritarian approach to learning, where the learner explores at his or her own pace in a non-linear and individualistic way. The web is a paradigm of open-endedness and its multimedia possibilities allow for multi-symbolic representations which encourage just the kind of aptitude with representational systems that students need in order to succeed academically. The web is in addition a paradigm of knowledge in a social space; the web, unlike a book, can in principle be infinitely added to, and invites participation. The resources which stand out in particular are those which allow for collaboration, that is those which facilitate dialogue and discussion: email, list-servers, chatrooms and discussion boards. These resources make communication with the tutor, and with fellow-students—and indeed with people outside of one’s immediate learning community—far easier, thus providing opportunities for (1) describing and interpreting the learning material, and thereby gaining practice in and assimilating the appropriate discourse; (2) gaining access to different perspectives, either consonant or dissonant with the student’s own, and thus bringing about reflection on the student’s own perspective as one that must be justified to others (opportunities for disequilibrium); (3) in virtue of its own open-endedness and relative lack of structure, encouraging students to develop their own structures and frameworks in order to make sense of the domain with which they are dealing.

Apart from teaching methodologies, it is also worthwhile exploring some of the more general factors upon which higher-level thinking skills are predicated. The factor I wish to consider here is literacy. It is a little acknowledged fact that these higher-level skills are those which characterise literate cultures, and that they do so in virtue of the type of manipulation of symbolic or representational symbols which literacy allows for; not surprisingly, this is also at the centre of academic competence generally, particularly in higher education, where we do not deal with ‘brute’ experiences—or here less than anywhere else—but more significantly, with representations.

1.3 Representation and discourse

A further methodological principle that teachers are often exhorted to put into practice is that of making learning relevant to learners, by connecting material with their experiences. This seems particularly difficult in philosophy, as even when experiences can be drawn upon, their pedagogical value tends to be relatively quickly exhausted. In addition, philosophy does not lend itself to application in ‘live’ contexts. Even with our best efforts to render it more concrete, there is no getting round its highly abstract nature. Philosophy is not alone in this, but shares this peculiarity with disciplines such as theoretical physics, mathematics and logic among others; in fact, to a large extent it shares it with academic learning generally, particularly at the level of higher education, which is not primarily about experiences, but about descriptions and representations4. In a critique of the conception of academic learning as situated cognition—which stresses the contextual nature of learning, using knowledge in ‘authentic activity’ (2002:14), and ‘the unity between problem, context and solution when the problem is experienced, rather than given’ (2002:15), Diana Laurillard suggests that situated learning, while useful in getting students to generate abstractions from multiple contexts, is not sufficient to bring about academic learning, which requires that students engage, not only with their own experience, but with knowledge derived from others’ experience, and formalised in representational systems, which make it generalisable beyond specific contexts, and generally available to others. Academic learning thus has a decontextualised, second-order nature; teachers mediate between experiences relevant to the discipline and descriptions and other formal representations in which the knowledge specific to the discipline is couched. Laurillard writes that: ‘Whereas natural environments afford learning of percepts through situated cognition, teaching must create artificial environments that afford the learning of ‘precepts’, i.e. descriptions of the world’ (2002:24). Teaching ought thus to be geared at least as much towards descriptions of experiences as towards experiences, and an important task of the teacher is to try to get students to generate the ‘intended way of representing’ their experience. Importantly, these academic experiences are always heavily mediated; first by the conceptions that students bring to them in the first place, and second by the representational system of the discipline they are learning. It is necessary to bring about an adequation between these and an important way of doing this is by getting students to articulate or make explicit their conceptions through descriptions and other representations, and to reflect on them, both so that they can be challenged if there are any misconceptions, and also so that they begin to consider the descriptions as descriptions. Only when they’re capable of doing this are they starting to be initiated into the discipline; only then can they begin to ‘make the moves’ that are recognisable as moves in that discipline. The articulation of and reflection upon conceptions—their own and those of others—requires well-developed representational skills to start off with; but in addition, ‘students need explicit practice in the representation of knowledge of their subject, in language, symbols, graphs, diagrams, and in the manipulation and interpretation of representations’ (Laurillard 2002:40). This also means that active learning, or getting students to ‘act on the world’ is in fact getting them to act on descriptions of the world rather than on an unmediated world. In academic contexts, students do not gain direct knowledge of the world, but mediated knowledge; even better, one might say, knowledge indissolubly embedded in the discourse of the subject. ‘When students engage with those worlds by interpreting a novel, or identifying a substance, or critiquing an organisation, they are generating further descriptions, or representations, which do not themselves engage directly with the world, only with the world of the teacher’ (2002:55), that is, with a representative of the discursive domain of the subject.

Philosophy is a thoroughly discursive discipline; in philosophy we have, in a sense, nothing but the representational level. Our ‘world of experience’ is itself always already a matter of conceptions and representations which students bring with them and on which we try to get students to reflect; even our experiments are for the most part thought experiments. In this, philosophy is probably closest to literature and history of art. Students in some disciplines may be able to assume that they are acting directly on the world, even if this is misconceived. But students of philosophy soon learn that this is an assumption they cannot easily make in the case of philosophy; at the very least, it is rendered problematic for them early on in their philosophical education. This is possibly what leads to the oft-repeated puzzled questions such as ‘But what difference does it make to anything?’; overcoming the puzzlement is possibly simultaneous with learning to recognise a philosophical problem. The ‘doing’ of philosophy, the action of active learning, all occurs in the domain of discourse. Students’ skill at expressing philosophical ideas is paramount, which is why so much of philosophy teaching is geared towards getting students to write and to talk. Online technologies may well simply be tools that allow for more expression, more writing and ‘talking’, and their usefulness may lie simply in this fact. I believe, however, that they are a specific form of discourse, practice in which may be beneficial in its own right. It is worth considering, first, what are the different educational affordances of writing and talking, or literacy and orality.

1.3.1 Literate thought

So far, we know that higher-level cognitive skills are those which rely upon a greater degree of reflection upon concepts and principles, and so going beyond what is given, to question, tease out implications, make generalisations, embed within structures, and so on. We also know that the ability to do this depends on representational skills; that is, the skills required to grasp and manipulate representational systems in which academic knowledge is couched. In this section, I look at these skills in more detail, in particular, the way in which they are predicated upon literate thought.

Perhaps we do not appreciate sufficiently the extent to which writing changes thought. Predominantly oral cultures—of which there are not many surviving today—thought in ways that it takes a great leap of the imagination for literate minds to conceive of. Oral minds lived in a substantially different world of knowledge to ours, in ways which it would be tangential to this project to enumerate5. The kind of changes that occurred with the advent of literacy are such as to have made the array of academic disciplines that we are familiar with possible; including philosophy, despite its oral origins. The most important characteristics of written discourse for our purposes are the following:

To be inducted into written discourse is not simply to have a handy means of registering one’s thoughts and spoken utterances; rather literates not only write but also speak literately: ‘they organize, to varying degrees, even their oral expression in thought patterns and verbal patterns that they would not know of unless they could write’ (Ong 1982:56). Plato’s repudiation of the poets was itself dependent on his having a literate mind, one which, for example, allowed for the kind of objective distance in contrast with which the poets’ total identification with Achilles or Odysseus, their privileging of ‘soul’ over reason, could appear degenerate; and his own critique of writing was made possible by the analytical thought concomitant with writing (Ong 1982:79).

Apart from the characteristics listed above, a major feature of literate thought is, as David Olson (1994) points out, that it is about representations (explicit statements, equations, maps, diagrams, etc.), rather than about the world. To say that academic learning (as described above) is dependent on literate thought is an understatement; it is impossible without it. In literate thought a distinction is made between the representation and what it is a representation of, making it possible to consider the representation in its own right. This consideration in turn concerns the way in which the representation ought to be taken: for example, literally or metaphorically, whether it is a factual claim or a relational model, whether it describes a cause or an effect; whether a statement makes a claim or provides evidence for the claim. These different ways of ‘taking’ statements are the building blocks of inferences7. And lastly, the representation is distinguished from the thoughts of its speaker or writer; in other words, a gap opens up between knowledge and opinion. Each of these points comes down to the fact that literate thought is a ‘conscious representation and deliberate manipulation of thinking activities’ (Olson 1994:280). If thinking includes such activities as perception, assumption, inference, generalisation, description and judgement, literate thought allows for the recognition of thinking activities for what they are: perception as perception, assumption as assumption, etc. It also allows for the discernment of relations among utterances. While literate thought is not restricted to written discourse, and is normally embedded in oral discourse too, the ability to make this kind of distinction and to reflect upon representations is honed in the activity of textual interpretation, as ‘thinking about text requires that a reader learn how to take texts in various ways and adjudicate these possible ways in the light of evidence’ (1994:281). Just as surely, however, it is dependent on producing representations as well as interpreting them; just as to be fully competent in a language means being able to understand it as well as speak it, write it as well as read it. To produce a representation one must be conscious of the act of interpretation to which they are geared; conscious, that is, that they will be ‘taken’ and reflected upon in the ways outlined above, and thus be capable of taking and reflecting upon them oneself: literate thought is self-conscious thought all the way through.

From these considerations, it is evident that writing is not an inert tool; the very act of writing develops and forms thought8. This is true not only at the broad social levels (i.e. with respect to what goes to form the most important characteristics of the mode of thought of whole societies and cultures), but also on the level of the development of the thought of individual. As one philosopher deeply bothered by the downturn in students’ literacy during the 1980s put it: ‘One of the reasons we force ourselves and our students to put [our philosophical positions] into words is that the exercise gives them shape, defines them, transforms them’ (Pletcher 1993:111). On this view, thought depends for its contour, its content and its clarity on the process of writing. And I think that this will be something with which we are all familiar: the feeling that we do not really know what we think until we try to write it down—and the writing can surprise us.

Written discourse is usually associated with the rise of individualism and with the conception of individual responsibility for one’s beliefs. Writing and reading are solitary, private and silent activities of the individual withdrawn from the cacophony of the communal forum. This needs to be kept in balance with the fact that literacy is a social condition. Reading and writing imply participating in a ‘textual community’ (Olson 1994:273): a group of readers and writers who share ways of interpreting, and who share a body of texts, as well as ways of applying them. This in part has to do with the power and prestige associated with textual repositories of knowledge; in academic contexts, it also has to do with the way in which the nature and content of a discipline are specified: that is, by reference to paradigms and discourses.

1.3.2 Speaking up for Orality

Primary orality is, from the perspective of a literate society, irrecoverable. Oral discourse in a literate society is shot through with literate thought, and this is especially the case in academic contexts. In the preceding section we saw that the higher-level cognitive faculties that form the core of philosophical competence, are embedded in literate thought, and that these are honed and developed through the practices of interpreting and producing text. Oral discourse, however, has other features which give it its time-honoured place in academic institutions. Some of these are:

All of these features are a corollary of the fact of the embodied presence of the participants in oral discourse. There is a more spontaneous and immediate give-and-take between interlocutors (which I take up in section 1.4 as being particularly valuable for philosophical argument); though less structured and organised and more redundant than written discourse, some things—such as attitudes and turn-taking protocols—are conveyed extremely economically, through tone, gesture, and other forms of body language. Despite the many virtues of written language, it can also be overly formal and rigid, or overly ‘worked’, and so lack the straightforwardness and directness of which spoken discourse is capable. Oral discourse tends to be more communitarian and less centred on the individual than written discourse, or at least, to lend itself to this more easily (the flipside of this is that it can also be more authoritarian if one person takes over the conversation, by social or institutional position—for example, a lecturer in a lecture hall—or by sheer force of personality and loudness of voice). That which emerges from oral dialogue can more readily give a sense of shared ownership, of having sprung from the dialogue itself, rather than on having been foisted on it from some external force. Oral practices, in addition, give an immediate and more real sense of community or intersubjectivity than is possible with predominantly textual practices.

In academic learning, it is important to allow not only for much practice in using and manipulating the discourse of the discipline, but to allow for diverse practice: not only through reading and writing, but speaking too. This can be an extremely important aspect of a student’s competence in the discipline, as verbal expression of their ideas, understandings and positions, forces him or her to think about these in a different way than when writing, or even thinking about a text they are reading. The greater variety of expressions an idea is given, the better. In section 3.3 we shall see that with on-line technologies a form of oral-written discourse has emerged which combines aspects of both, and which it may be useful to exploit as a form of discursive practice.

2. Philosophy

It has already been mentioned that philosophical skills are concentrated in higher-level cognitive skills; further that these are the very skills that are encouraged by constructivist teaching principles and that are in turn associated with success in academic contexts which are contexts of descriptions and representations rather than of direct or unmediated knowledge; in addition, the ability to produce and manipulate representations specific to the discipline one is studying is central to an understanding of that discipline, and full participation in the discipline. This, we saw, is particularly true of philosophy which is thoroughly discursive. I have also argued that these skills are intertwined with literate thought; this underscores the importance of getting students to participate in the discourse of the discipline they are studying in particular by written and interpretive interactions with it. However, the more intersubjective and communal aspects of a discipline are enhanced by oral discourse, particularly dialogue. In addition, oral expression of ideas reinforces and/or feeds into students’ ‘at home-ness’ in a discipline, not least by giving them further practice in a different representational medium than writing. Before we can begin to broach the question which technologies to use in teaching philosophy, and how to use them, we need to have a clear idea of what we expect philosophy students to be capable of doing. Which skills receive most attention depends to some extent on the philosophical tradition in which teachers operate. UK departments of philosophy are predominantly analytical and so skills of analysis and argument will tend to come to the fore; a more historical and usually Continental approach will instead tend to privilege interpretation and exegesis. However, in practice, the division is rather artificial, and I think that there can be substantial agreement that the three most important philosophical skills that we try to develop in our students are (1) analysis, (2) argument, (3) interpretation. In fact, these three skills are interwoven as analysis requires interpretation, and argument depends on the prior abilities to analyse and interpret correctly other philosophical positions.

Below is a very brief outline of each of what we expect successful philosophy students will be able to do with respect to each of these skills.

Analysis

Students must be able to:

Argument

This has two aspects: the evaluation of arguments, and the construction or advancing of arguments. Some of the skills involved in this are:

Interpretation

Here we expect students to grasp the meaning of philosophical concepts, propositions and texts. What constitutes successful interpretation is a contentious issue, but for the purposes of this study, I shall assume that there is agreement as to what would constitute an inept interpretation on the one hand, and a valid (though not necessarily merely for that reason acceptable) interpretation on the other. I take it that such agreement would include the following points:

Another important aspect of philosophical interpretation is the very ability to pick out the arguments in a text, and to reconstruct them. Students should be able to pick out the difference between a claim and evidence for the claim; as well as between specific arguments and the broader conceptual framework and view that informs arguments. They should also be able to see the relation, if there is any, between the issues addressed in the historical text, and the issues of contemporary philosophy.

At present, most UK philosophy departments divide teaching and learning between spoken and written media. Teaching tends to be predominantly oral—apart of course from reading that students are expected to do—and testing tends to be predominantly written. Teaching itself is usually divided between lectures and some sort of discussion forum, be this in seminars or tutorials. Obviously there is a great deal of variation between institutions, faculties and individual lecturers.

Pedagogically, the most important thing a lecturer can do for her students is to get them to do philosophy. Active doing is essential to philosophy because of its very nature as a persuasive discourse: students need to decide whether they are persuaded, but in order to do that, they must do the reasoning for themselves, and evaluate it. A student who simply assimilates the thought of philosophers she reads about, and perhaps is able even to reproduce it in the form of summaries and paraphrases will not generally have understood much.

2.1 The intersubjective nature of philosophy

Philosophy is an interactive and intersubjective discipline. As is the case with all communication, philosophical communication is dialogical, in that it is geared towards the addressee10. But this is of particular significance in philosophy, since philosophical discourse is pre-eminently persuasive. A philosopher attempts to persuade others to her position, by laying out the reasoning which justifies it. This lies behind the argumentational style for which philosophy is known, particularly Western philosophy. Philosophical discourse is an invitation to others to participate in the unfolding of the argument presented and philosophical communication will fail if the addressee does not follow the reasoning and evaluate it. Thus, philosophical discourse has an in-built agreement to subject one’s thoughts and ideas to the critical scrutiny of others. It is through this intersubjective endeavour that a theory develops and becomes robust as it withstands and responds to critical scrutiny.

Sometimes this process is criticised for being adversarial, and for being overly ego-centric and indeed ego-bruising. When pursued for the purposes of jointly arriving at the most robust possible theory, however, it can be, and has proved to be, very fruitful. Participation in this kind of dialogue places the emphasis on advancing and evaluating justifications for a theory, and in so doing develops in participants a better understanding of the theory, of its consequences and implications and just what kind of commitments it entails and what kind of framework inform it. The adversarial method can be looked upon as the philosophical equivalent of scientific testing in that it exposes the fault-lines in a philosophical theory, or even—though far less frequently (and in this too it is not dissimilar from the actual practice of scientific testing)—when it is time to give up on a theory. It thus promotes a deeper understanding of the theory as one defends it against the criticisms of others11.

The adversarial method does not, of course, exhaust philosophical method or philosophical dialogue. Not all of the interaction that occurs is adversarial in nature, if this implies that it relies on negative responses to a theory. Exposing one’s thoughts and ideas to others can also elicit refinements of the theory or result in developments unforeseen by the person who originally advanced the idea. And it can, of course also elicit approval and appreciation. Indeed, the adversarial method works best with it establishes consensus as well as disagreement; that is, as dialogue progresses, differences in positions emerge against a background of agreement and consensus. The label ‘adversarial’ does however capture the argumentational nature of philosophical dialogue: the fact that one attempts to win others to one’s point of view, with the expectation that agreement will have to be pursued rather than taken for granted, or that one’s claims will meet with resistance. However, because of the negative connotations of the term ‘adversarial’, I shall use the terms ‘argumentational dialogue’ or simply ‘dialogue’ in this study.

 

2.2 Written vs. oral in philosophy

Apart from the intertwinement of higher-level cognitive skills with writing and reading, and academic discourse generally, there are other good reasons for eliciting written discourse from students of philosophy. Writing facilitates the ordering and organisation of thought at least in part due to its removal from the immediacy and spontaneity of spoken dialogue; it also develops and forms thought, and allows for the development of sustained argument, which in turn produces richer and deeper philosophical thought. The place of writing in philosophy is well-attested by the place that it holds in the assessment of students’ philosophical abilities. Even though writing philosophy is enormously important for grasping philosophical ideas (not merely conveying a grasp thereof, but going a long way towards forming its content), as teachers of philosophy we know how seldom it actually is the expression of a student’s own views on a topic. Students often churn out the rhetoric of arguing for and against positions, which to a large extent they have gleaned from secondary sources, and on which they do not, often, have real positions of their own. In my own experience, I have often found that in a tutorial situation, students will have produced an essay which appears to reproduce the kind of discourse which seems to be expected of them, but when asked to verbalise their position or a particular concept, principle or argument, they either have great difficulty in doing it or simply cannot. I think that the difficulty for students lies in the fact that it is possible to parrot academic discourse to a certain extent, and that we as lecturers and tutors are so used to the discourse ourselves that we fail to see whether what they write represents an authentic appropriation of material on the part of students. In part, this is due to the fact that the ideas and concepts and theories are indeed embedded in the discourse to which we are inducting students, as we have already seen to be the case, and the ability to reproduce the discourse can sometimes fool us, as well as the students. This is why the request to express the ideas in the different register of oral discourse can often be extremely cognitively demanding for students, revealing gaps or incoherencies between what they express and what they think, and what, perhaps, they ought to think. This is a further reason why it is important to try to get students to express their ideas in different registers.

This alone is good reason to provide opportunities for spoken as well as written philosophising. In addition, dialogue and discussion are invaluable resources due to the intersubjective nature of philosophy, in particular, the fact that it is both interpretational and persuasive. First, the skill of attending to others’ utterances in order to comprehend them as accurately as possible is developed; second, feedback to one’s position is immediate, directing attention to unclarities of expression (which are also often unclarities of thought), and weaknesses (or strengths) in one’s thought and expression, which can in turn be rectified, modulated or reinforced immediately; third, one is exposed to several different perspectives in a relatively short space of time, which results in one’s own views being developed in greater awareness of the kinds of things that must be taken into account in building up that viewpoint. In addition, despite the fact that it is writing that is normally more closely associated with individualism, it is often in dialogue and discussion that we actually see students forming and ‘owning’ their own viewpoints. This may be because of their presence—that is, physical, embodied presence—or it may be simply because of the immediate give and take of dialogue and discussion, or because of the comfort with the discourse they are using, the greater authenticity that it has to students as being their own ‘language’. All these benefits, however, are only really extracted from an ideal discussion situation: the price of these benefits is the type of disorganisation, irrelevancy, and redundancy which often characterises live seminars, subject as they are to the more volatile social dynamics of face-to-face meetings. Of course this can be beneficial, sometimes yielding unexpected insights and lines of thought. But each live dialogue involves a bit of a gamble concerning just how productive it will be.

Lastly, there are obviously the kind of reading skills that we expect students to have. This is also a matter of the intersubjectivity of philosophy, as well as of the broader academic context in which students enter a world of descriptions and representations. It is paramount that students read interactively, rather than passively: that is, that they experience themselves as addressed by the work, and engage with it, in a process of ongoing interpretation, commentary, applications, thinking out implications, making comparisons, and so on. Even though written discourse is linear, linear reading is not necessarily what we want to encourage, if linear reading is simply a matter of starting at the beginning and finishing at the end. We need to encourage interactive readings that loop back, that structure and re-structure, that make hypotheses which are refined, modified or rejected in a dynamic process. The very act of interpreting is itself a way of doing philosophy; but all too often, it is something which students do on ‘automatic pilot’; something which they get out of the way in order then also to get their essays out of the way. Philosophical texts are often difficult and not of the most ‘reader-friendly’; any way to break the barriers to engaging with texts must be a welcome addition to teachers’ resources.

In view of the general pedagogical principles that I have outlined, and of the specific aims of philosophy, what do on-line environments offer that can further these principles and aims? In the next section, I discuss three benefits of using on-line technologies which I take to be of particular interest to teachers of philosophy. As will be seen, these are not systems that can be left to take care of themselves, and each of the benefits is to be gained only at some cost (especially initially) in terms of time and effort. Lecturers will want to know whether it is worth expending the time and effort for the benefits that might accrue. The following will, I hope, help them to decide.

3. Central resources of online environments for learning

Some encompassing reasons that the internet may be conducive to active, engaged learning may be its allegedly democratic, open and participative nature, but whether it in fact has these characteristics is a moot point. Here I shall concentrate on three reasons why online environments stimulate active learning. Online environments make available resources that:

In listing these three central resources, I have limited myself to the resources geared towards discussion, and so have not considered the Internet as a source of information, or further applications of online learning environments13.

3.1 Collaboration

The Internet is the space of interpersonal connections, and facilitates collaboration simply in virtue of that. In fact, it is not only conducive to collaboration, but engenders it. It must not be forgotten that the Internet is also at the centre of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, being an economy in which working relations are more collaborative than ever before, and working contexts are highly relational, intersubjective and consensual; there is not much space in this type of working environment for the lone individual plugging away single-handedly at a problem. The rhetoric with which it is accompanied tends to stress interactivity and deregulation, heterarchy rather than hierarchy, horizontal relations between participants rather than vertical relations between superiors and subordinates. Collaboration is very much the name of the game, and it happens also to be the game that the Internet is most appropriate for.

The most important ways in which collaboration is facilitated is by email, listserv, discussion boards and chatrooms. Communication takes the form of one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many discussions. There are two main types of discussion: synchronous and asynchronous. Among all these options, there are obviously many permutations possible. Synchronous discussions occur in real time, and require the contemporaneous presence of all participants. They are most likely to occur in chatrooms, though email is so fast as to sometimes have the same effect on a one-to-one basis (unless others are copied into messages). Asynchronous discussions do not occur in real time and so do not require the contemporaneous presence of all participants; there is a delay between messages and responses, though not so much of a delay as to diminish the over-riding discussion ‘feel’.

Differences between synchronous and asynchronous on-line conversations

One of the most important advantages of asynchronous on-line conversations is that no special time must be set for them. It is often difficult to find a time that will suit all students, or even a small group of students, for synchronous discussions.

In asynchronous written conversations—such as through a discussion board—participants have time to read others’ contributions carefully and to think about the wording and substance of their own response. In synchronous written conversations—such as through a chat facility—there is pressure to respond quickly, in fact, almost as quickly as in face-to-face conversations. Good chat participation may be impeded by a lack of fast and accurate typing skills. Most chat facilities have a limit as to how many characters they allow in each message; this and the real time constraints make chat better for quick repartee, than for discussing issues that require some depth. By contrast, asynchronous conversations allow for more substantial, better thought-out and longer responses. The length of messages is however ultimately limited by the nature of on-line give and take: even asynchronous conversations have a faster turnover than is traditionally the case with written discourse, and related to this is the fact that the medium does not support overly long conversation ‘turns’.

Synchronous conversations often have a chaotic feel to them, which is especially evident when the transcripts are re-read. The responses do not flow as they would in a normal conversation, in particular if there are many participants. The protocols for synchronous conversations are only now emerging, but need to be set up to govern things like turn-taking, and, in the case of many-to-many chats, to make it explicit who or what points are being addressed. When there are a number of participants, there is a danger of many of the messages being at cross-purposes, and there is a concomitant lack of coherence. In my own experience of conducting on-line chats with 8 to 10 students, I felt as though I were in a room-full of people, all talking to me at once and demanding attention at once. This was unnerving and a deeply unsatisfying teaching experience, since I felt that none of the issues raised was getting the attention deserved. The chats seemed to be experienced by students as a kind of ‘cocktail hour’ after lectures; they wanted an opportunity to raise issues and put forward questions but not really to engage with them fully. I have also used chat software that allows the tutor to moderate the conversation: participants’ messages are sent first to the tutor in a separate window, and the tutor decides if and in what order they will appear in the main window. This takes quite some skill, and puts the tutor under great pressure, not least because it appears rude not to be attending to someone’s message. It also has a slightly disjointed effect for participants, who do not see their messages appearing as soon as they type them.

There is much more potential for synchronous conversations to be useful on a one-to-one basis, particularly in a structured conversation: for example, something along the lines of a Socratic dialogue in which each participant argues for an opposing point of view. Used in this way, it can be used to encourage students’ ability to think on their feet (or through their fingertips!), something akin to learning to play timed chess.

In asynchronous conversation, on the other hand, one does not expect an immediate response. Whether there is greater continuity and coherence, and a better flow depends on how the discussion board arranges messages (whether, for example, there is a topic tree, or whether messages are simply listed chronologically). It also depends greatly on how the discussion is moderated (more on this later).

Much has been written on the fact that online conversations lack the kind of contextual signs that are present in face-to-face conversations, the most important of which are those conveyed by body language, expression, gesture and tone, which can convey very economically what it is rather laborious and stilted to convey in written language. This is, of course, one of the sources of the formality of written language, which is decontextualised (or at least, more so than spoken language) and so requires formal written protocols for conveying phatic functions14. In keeping with the relative informality of online discussions, this has resulted to many resorting to ‘emoticons’: smiley faces, and so on (and to many others being greatly annoyed by them). But these are deliberately or self-consciously used, and so do not replicate the enormous number of non-deliberate cues given in face-to-face conversations. In a face-to-face seminar or tutorial, it is possible to gauge when students understand or are struggling even when this is not immediately apparent from what they say. In on-line discussions, much more must be made explicit, while avoiding heavy-handedness; this is one of the reasons that they require almost as much attention to inter-personal skills as to knowledge of the material being discussed. This may, however, be attributable to the fact that the norms of on-line discussions are in the process of being conventionalised15. With time, this aspect may become easier.

The lack of personal embodied presence is not always a drawback. It has also been noted that online discussions do not make apparent racial differences or class differences conveyed by accent, clothing, demeanour, etc. and so allow for a social dynamic free of stereotyping or cultural assumptions. Students who would not always participate in face-to-face exchanges do so more freely in online discussions. However, differences in writing skills and in levels of literacy must not be ignored here: it has also been noted that students who are not so confident of their writing skills are afraid to participate in these discussions, for fear of being embarrassed16. In addition, there are still some important gender differences with respect to the amount and manner of participation in online discussions17. The online world is not as much of an equaliser as is often given to believe. However, it does seem to be the case that shy students, from whom it is difficult to get input in face-to-face contexts, do participate more readily in online discussions18.

It seems that the Internet is especially geared towards superficial social relations between people grouped together for particular purposes or in view of some interest (Castells 2000:389). It has not replaced face-to-face interaction, but seems, where possible (that is, where not impeded by great geographical distances), to result in more face-to-face interaction than people would otherwise have. For our purposes, the way in which online discussions feed into and improve the quality of face-to-face interactions will be a particular concern. However, a study of this type would be incomplete without taking into account the reservations of those who, like Hubert Dreyfus (2001), stress how impoverished is the online world in comparison to the face-to-face world, with particular reference to academic contexts. Dreyfus is no doubt correct in pointing out that recognising relevance requires embodied presence, that academic learning occurs as much by imitation of embodied representatives of a discipline as by the kind of skills that I have listed above, that involvement and presence are important, possibly essential, for the acquisition of skills, and that our sense of reality and commitment are closely connected similarly requires dealings with fully present others. There is no doubt that eliminating face-to-face interactions where they are possible in favour of online interactions is not a good idea, simply because there is much more to academic contexts—even philosophical ones—than abstract knowledge. While a mass replacement of face-to-face teaching with distance teaching is certainly not desirable, and ought to be resisted, it is also to be considered that distance education is an important equaliser with respect to access to higher education, and that resources that enhance it are obviously to be welcomed. Bates, for example, reports on the fact that distance students who have had access to computer conferencing find it ‘a deeply satisfying and emotional environment’ (1995:210). My own experience with adult students on a distance course in philosophy predominantly carried out via online discussion (both asynchronous and synchronous) is that they respond very enthusiastically and warmly to the medium, on a social as well as academic level (or at least, the active participants do). It would appear that online resources for discussion and collaboration undoubtedly do enhance distance education, bringing social as well as academic benefits. The issues concerning the extent and manner of usage of these resources differ widely across distance and face-to-face academic contexts, and not least of these are pragmatic and logistical issues; the present study, however, concentrates on the way these resources contribute to learning at a more cognitive level.

 

3.2 Interactivity

Collaboration goes hand-in-hand with interactivity. In an ideal collaborative environment, students interact both which each other and with the material that is being studied. That they do both is extremely important for the quality of the learning that takes place in an online forum, or it can come to be used as a purely social space. The kind of interaction to be encouraged is that which gets students to engage as fully as possible with the ideas and issues they are dealing with; but to do this, they need to engage with each other in ways that go beyond simply affirming one another. This happens a lot in online discussions, which are sometimes ‘pathologically polite’, and which one student interviewed by Rourke and Anderson described as being a matter of ‘mutual stroking’ (2002:12). Ways must be found in order to get students to interact critically but not antagonistically, with each other.

Ideally, participants interact with each other, through the ongoing common transcript of the discussion auto-generated by the discussion board tool. Discussion boards automatically create an archive of the discussion. Thus, the history of the discussion is retrievable; this means that participants in the discussion can return to and inspect previous messages, the development of the discussion can itself be reflected upon in order to see what kind of dynamics have led to the current state of the discussion, and messages can be linked back to previous messages in the discussion’s history.

This common file is a ‘shared object’, ‘built and shared by members’, which not only ‘provides opportunities for interaction’ (Harasim 1989:52), but is itself an object with which interactions occur. For example, the archive of the discussion invites interactive reading, that is, reading which does not proceed by passive absorption in a linear sequence, but reading which depends on readers to structure and organise the material as they choose the way they navigate through the archive.

Interactive reading and the hypertext

Thus, online environments are conducive to interactivity in virtue of the collaborative structures they allow for, and in virtue of the way they have of organising text: or precisely, not organising it for the reader, but allowing the reader to organise and structure it, and in fact, giving the reader more responsibility for organisation and framing19. Hypertext (or linked texts) can be navigated in any of a number of ways; thus, it has precisely a web-like structure; it is dispersed rather than hierarchical, non-linear rather than linear (Kolb 1996:17). The linear format of a printed document does not mean that we actually read in a linear way, as any scholar knows, but it does mean that readers ‘interfere’ with the text in order to loop back, compare and contrast, and get from point to point in anything but the linear order; in hypertext, instead, there is no linear format to begin with. Rather the text is structured in a more web-like manner, which allows the reader to choose among several possibilities of ordering their reading. The difference lies merely in the in-built open-endedness of hypertexts.

A further important aspect of interactivity in online environments is that they invite participation in building up the hypertext, particularly in a discussion, where the archive of the discussion can be added to by participants. This invitation to participate is an aspect of the non-closure of the hypertext in a discussion context, which can be added to, in principle, indefinitely20. Open-endedness is thus manifested in two ways: in the possibilities for alternatives to linear reading, and in the possibility of adding to the text.

While this may allow for a more interactive reading, in which readers have more responsibility for structuring and ordering the text for themselves, it can also lead to superficiality and incoherence21. It gives rise to the impression that one often has on the Internet of information overload, without an englobing framework to make sense of the information. Learning how to structure texts is probably one of the most basic reading skills that students need to develop, as it is the first step to analysing and making sense of it. Hypertext may have an in-built open-endedness, but students do not have an in-built knowledge of how to deal with the open-endedness. This is what they learn as they learn the discipline they are studying. Thus non-linear interactive reading may sound good, but can also waste a lot of time and lead to readings which are the very opposite of engaged, as students simply skim from link to link.

For educational purposes, hypertext therefore needs to be structured, and some kind of closure brought about (even if possibly only porous, as Kolb advocates (1996:23). Online environments have the potential to be very useful, but only with quite some intervention on the part of teachers. This sounds as though we’re bringing the authoritarianism back in, but not a lot is achieved, pedagogically speaking, in its total absence.

3.3 Text-based communication

The Internet is a multimedia space, and while there are no doubt many applications of the multimedia environment which are useful to educators, the overwhelming number of communications that it facilitates are text-based. At any rate, in this study I concentrate on the text-based communications facilities of discussion boards and hypertext. The fact that discussions occur through the written medium is an important educational resource in and of itself, and one which is particularly useful for philosophy.

Communication on discussion boards is written but has many of the features associated with oral communication22. Much of this is simply a matter of the in-built temporality of on-line communications, which have an immediacy approaching that of oral communication. There is a much faster give-and-take, or contribution and response time with computer-mediated communication than there is with other forms of written discourse. We have by now all experienced this with email communications, which seem to demand quicker attention than do letters that arrive by ordinary mail. The time factor affects the length of messages too: the medium is not conducive to very long messages, which fail to hold attention, just as face-to-face dialogues are not conducive to one person holding the floor for a great length of time, and where this does occur, it can be experienced as rude or socially inept. The Web, it must be said, is over-all a space which is conducive precisely to surfing, rather than to sustained attention, this being the scarcity which drives its particular economy. The most successful messages are those which are concise, to the point, and demand attention fairly directly. One of the best ways of achieving this is by evoking or eliciting response from others. Perhaps because of this more explicit conative function 23, which makes them explicitly other-oriented, the messages in online discussions, though written, approach the personal and informal tone of oral communications.

Although online discussion technologies abbreviate the time between contribution and response, giving these discussions the feel of oral give-and-take, they in fact allow for more careful expression and formulation than oral turn-taking, as well as for reflection on one’s own and others’ messages, and for revision. Again, the explicit other-orientation of these messages means that there must be an attempt to make oneself clear and comprehensible to the other (with the concomitant increase in clarity and comprehension in one’s own thought). Some researchers claim that participating in asynchronous discussions is especially conducive to enhancing literate forms of higher order thinking, since ‘participants read, actively choosing nonlinear pathways through online texts or hypertexts, thus constructing their learning experience by choosing what they will read, and in what sequence’ (Lapadat 2002:7). In the previous section it was seen that non-linearity is not in itself a virtue, easily giving way to incoherence and superficiality; thus whether this benefit really does accrue, will depend to a large extent on measures taken to prevent this from occurring.

The important thing about the language of online discussion messages, is that it remains close enough to the linguistic and discursive register in which the person is most comfortable, while also approaching a more formal, organised, structured and academic register. Ideally, in the language of these messages, students should be ‘trying out’ the discourse of the discipline they are studying in a non-threatening way; there should be a process of adequation between students’ language and that of the discipline. Especially significant should be those points where students discover that they cannot express their ideas except by taking on the discourse of the discipline; these might mark turning points in students’ authentic appropriation of the discourse. The claim may be made that just because academic learning involves dealing with representations, and that is, both manipulating and producing them in as many diverse ways as is useful to the discipline, getting students to use this particular medium will give students more practice in doing so, in a way that could reinforce and supplement their reading, writing and speaking. The medium of text-based communication falls between essay-writing and oral communication. Effective messages in online discussions are those which are concise and to the point, and this is a skill which stands students in good stead in learning how to express their ideas. Apparently it was Wittgenstein who insisted, in a weekly meeting for philosophical discussion at Cambridge, that no participant’s contribution should last for longer than two minutes. I am not sure whether this can be attributed to Wittgenstein, but at any rate, the rule does make for the acquisition of some very useful expressive and philosophical skills, such as distinguishing the main points of what one wants to say, and saying it as economically as possible. This is a skill which would enhance students’ essay writing, where it is appropriate for them to develop points and deepen their understanding of the topic, but where learning to distinguish between what is and what is not relevant says as much about their grasp of the topic as does their ability to say it concisely. It also sharpens their skills for oral discussions, as they gain practice in maintaining relevance and in expressing their ideas succinctly.

Many researchers are very optimistic about the contribution that written interactions can make to the development of students’ skills. Writing, Lapadat (2002) suggests, is always more formal than speaking, even in the context of online discussion, and so will tend to encourage greater reflection. She claims that the messages in asynchronous discussion are content-laden and lexically dense; thus participants both read material which is cognitively demanding, and express themselves in writing too, with all the benefits for literate higher-order thinking that this implies. There is, however, some controversy over whether the messages in discussion forums really do have this character, both with respect to their content, and to the levels of engagement and interactivity that actually occur in them. We need to question, therefore, whether using this forum to give students practice in learning the ropes of a discourse is as useful as it seems it should be.

4. Testing the claims: On-line discussion

The educational literature on the use of computer-mediated communication is overwhelmingly positive. Even though problems are pointed out, on the whole there is a tendency to treat these as surmountable, and furthermore, worth surmounting. Whether this is simply initial enthusiasm for a novelty is difficult to say; in principle, however, there is good reason for affirming the potential of online resources for enriching higher education. That online discussion is invaluable for distance education is difficult to gainsay: this is an arena where the problems are well-worth surmounting, as they offer opportunities for discussion that students would not otherwise have. There is a further question whether they should replace whatever opportunities for face-to-face discussion may traditionally have been relied upon in distance education, but in the absence of face-to-face discussion they should surely be pursued. In residential or traditional face-to-face higher education institutions, the question is whether and how these resources should be used to supplement face-to-face teaching. As will be clear in this section, there are challenges to using discussion forums to achieve the ends for which they have the potential, and they require dedication on the part of teachers who wish to experiment with them.

If we take the SOLO taxonomy as a way of testing whether students’ higher-level cognitive skills are enhanced by participating in online discussions, there is conflicting evidence. Whittle, Morgan & Maltby (2000) used the taxonomy to analyse students’ contributions to an online discussion, and their overall performance in a course (which happened to be on the use of multimedia in education), and found that ‘there was a close, positive association between students’ SOLO levels, their engagement with content, and their final grades’. To be more specific: of 12 students who participated,

‘one student […] achieved the extended abstract (b) level; six reached extended abstract (a) level; one reached relational (b) level; two reached relational (a) level; and two students […] failed to demonstrate that they had reached the relational (a) level of conceptual understanding. [These students] did not pass the Unit and they had the lowest levels of engagement with content in the class. Of the seven students who developed extended abstract SOLO levels; three […] demonstrated very high levels of engagement with content, and two […] were awarded high distinctions for their final grades.’

On this study, then, it would appear that participating in online discussion was certainly beneficial for students.

A study undertaken by M.J.W Thomas (2002), also using the SOLO taxonomy, came to very different conclusions. For this study, 69 students participated 24in discussions for first- and second-year undergraduate courses. The discussions took place in three themes, with each theme corresponding to one segment of the course. Participation in the discussions was compulsory and part of the students’ final assessment. The findings were markedly different for the first two themes than for the third. In the first two themes (chronologically, the first two segments of the courses on which the discussions were based) there was a relatively high level of cognitive engagement, with the majority of messages being coded under the multistructural and relational categories of the SOLO taxonomy. In the third theme, it was expected that students’ cognitive engagement would increase but instead it decreased: more specifically, there was an increase in multistructural content, yet a decrease in relational and extended abstract content. As Thomas points out: ‘This suggests that in the third theme, students were not integrating concepts related to the discussion topic, nor achieving a level of personal meaning that could be abstracted’ (2002:354). Three reasons are put forward for these findings: the students’ relative lack of familiarity in the field (which would bring it about that most of their interactions remained at the multistructural level); increased study load and impending examinations during the third theme; and a third reason which it will be useful to quote in full:

Students’ familiarity with the online discussion forum and its particular mode of learning, resulted in a shift away from an overtly academic and highly structured discourse. Therefore, some students’ messages in the third theme were less like mini-essays on the discussion topic and were more familiar in their tone. Furthermore, there was an increase in short messages, where a student simply made a brief supportive comment to another, or passed on a reference. it is possible that when students engage in more interactive discourse, they are less likely to provide evidence of the complexity of their knowledge structures and are more likely to communicate in a less integrated or abstracted manner. Accordingly, the perceived decrease in cognitive engagement may be an artefact of an improvement in their use of the online discussion forum, rather than an actual decrease in the students’ quality of learning. (2002:354)

Thomas goes on to consider overall structural features of each thread in the discussion. A threaded discussion is one which is organised into sub-headings under a general topic. As the discussion progresses, it becomes progressively more fragmented. As this occurs, there is more duplication in students’ messages, and the messages that occur late in the discussion get less and less discussion. Thomas puts forward several reasons for this: first, it is claimed that the asynchronous mode of discussion leads to isolation and to students’ messages being viewed as data to be stored rather than as a real contribution by another person in a dialogue; second, there is a lack of cohesion and coherence in the organisation of the discussion as threads branch off endlessly, without any apparent organisation; third, there is an unbreachable individuality built into written discourse as opposed to orality.

Thomas seems to labour under many assumptions concerning the nature of asynchronicity and oral versus written discourse in online environments. I hope to have tackled some of these in section 3.3. It must, however, also be noted that the discussions studied by Thomas were not actively moderated. Tutors or lecturers were involved only at the beginning of the discussion (‘encouraging both students and ‘theme’ and each thread simply began as an initial posting’), and from then on, students could structure and organise entirely as they pleased. They could also create their own threads. The discussion studied by Whittle et al, however, firstly involved far fewer students, and second, was moderated by the tutor. It would appear that far greater control was exercised over the discussion from the outset, with ‘[t]he sequencing and nature of the assessment tasks [being] carefully structured to maximise students’ participation, collaboration and active engagement with subject content’ and ‘[t]he instructor [using] the discussion facility to provide timely feedback to students and to intervene to keep discussions on track and sustain their momentum’ (Whittle, et al: 2000). It is not stated how threads were handled, for example, whether students could start their own threads, or only tutors could do so. And, as we have seen, this study came to far more positive conclusions.

There continues to be this balance of some negative results as against positive results, and especially a stress on the potential of online discussions to be useful in all the ways discussed above. For example, Rourke & Anderson quote the following summary of teachers’ complaints concerning the new technologies for discussion:

Analysis shows that most messages are in the category of comparing and sharing information. There is little evidence of the construction of new knowledge, critical analysis of peer ideas, or instances of negotiation. The discussions do not appear to foster testing and revision of ideas and negotiation of meaning which are processes fundamental to higher order thinking. Only a small percentage of contributions can be categorized as higher order cognition and awareness of knowledge building. (McLaughlin and Luca, 2000, quoted in Rourke & Anderson: 2002).

There are other sources of conflicting evidence. A study of student teachers in online discussion focused on the question whether online discussions helped students to identify and to discuss taken-for-granted assumptions, and concluded that although these discussions generated a ‘rich source of assumptions, students did not recognize them as such’ (although this is also related to students’ development) (Harrington & Hathaway 1994:553). When other students do draw attention to assumptions, there is often no response, indicating that there is also no change in the assumption. This in turn is contradicted by a study conducted by Judith Lapadat (2000), of an online interactive discussion forum of a graduate-level education course: she concludes that students do undergo conceptual change in such discussions, thus indicating that they do engage with one another’s messages, and their own, reflecting on them and subjecting them to critical scrutiny.

One of the difficulties in coming to a principled decision on whether online discussion resources really do meet the educational goals that they are claimed to meet is that the studies are often difficult to compare, involving different numbers of students, different courses, different strategies, and so on. Nevertheless, there is still an over-riding positive mood concerning these resources, often even by those whose studies have turned up negative results25, which may well be because they are still in the stage of being given the benefit of the doubt. To make use of a principle from Lakatos’ philosophy of science, this may be a period during which the hypothesis that computer-mediated communication leads to these learning benefits, is protected from disconfirming evidence, since there is good reason to think that ultimately it will be well-supported26.

In particular, more attention has been paid to the structure and organisation of online discussions. Even though the open-endedness of the online environment appears to allow for a more democratic and open participatory structure, in fact, unstructured discussions, or discussions without leadership do not work. This has been found to be the case in philosophy virtual seminars by Anthony Hatzimoysis, who writes that ‘in all cases where we set up a course forum, without defining main topics, but simply by letting students post messages, without any feedback whatsoever from a tutor, the forum would quietly but quickly die out’ (2002). If they do not die out, they are simply incoherent, superficial, and of scanty academic value. Coherence or structure is also an index of engagement on the part of participants with each other. In a discussion which becomes increasingly fragmented and dispersed, participants are not in fact responding to each others’ messages, so much as using them as catalysts for free associations. They do not give each other feedback, or take up each others’ points in a reflective manner. This can give rise to a discussion which is not so much a dialogue as a sequence of mini-monologues. A further problem that occurs here is that some participants use discussions as a kind of soap-box for holding forth—often at great length—on their own views. This happens with a certain kind of participant, probably reflective of a personality type as much as of anything else, who is perhaps not so good at real dialogue in any context, and is even less inhibited in a text-based environment. Overly long messages are a real impediment to useful online discussion, and undercut many of the benefits of the medium, not only with respect to keeping the discussion going (since others are likely to simply ignore the message and not respond) but also with respect to gaining practice in composing succinct, to the point messages which is one of the benefits of participating in these discussions. It is normally a good idea to include an explicit rule concerning the length of messages in the discussion rules or norms.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, short messages (‘I agree’, ‘Me too’) or no messages are obviously another impediment to discussions. Non-participation is one of the most prevalent problems in online discussions, and obviously, it is a problem which entirely negates the advantages thereof. Lecturers and tutors are unlikely to want to go to the trouble of setting up these discussions if they also have to coax students to participate. Again, it makes a big difference whether the discussion occurs in the context of a distance or face-to-face course; in the case of a distance course, some coaxing is not out of place, although it is also often the case that in these contexts, students are only too pleased to have the facility and require less coaxing. In the case of online discussions embedded within a face-to-face course, the rationale for using the medium must be made more explicit, with the benefits of participating made clear to students. It may also be appropriate to make participation compulsory, by, for example, making it a part of assessment. There are different ways of going about this, some of which will be outlined below. However, if lecturers do decide to opt for the compulsory route, they will have to be very committed to the medium themselves. Hatzimoysis (2002) remarks on the fact that asynchronous discussions are far less labour-intensive for tutors than are synchronous discussions, as they require, for a group of 30 students ‘a maximum of 2 hours per week for reading or commenting on student discussion, as opposed to a minimum of 6 hours per week for actually running each one of at least 6 different synchronous seminars’ (as students participate in synchronous seminars in groups of 2 to 5). I would dispute this: a well-run discussion needs almost daily attention from the discussion leader or moderator, and the moderating functions require more care and attention than can be achieved in 2 hours per week. In my own experience, the amount of time was closer to 2 hours per day or every second day. This may differ in a face-to-face context, but the success of the conference does depend on ongoing rather than sporadic participation by as many members as possible, and it is very much up to the moderator to keep this going. This is one of the over-riding practical reasons for setting up student-led as opposed to tutor-led discussions.

In the light of problems that have been encountered in these discussions, various researchers have outlined the kinds of activities that must be included in order to give the discussions more coherence and structure, and to ensure ongoing participation. Rourke & Anderson (2002:2-3) cite three roles or sets of responsibilities that must be addressed, relating to instructional design (selecting appropriate topics, implementing a discussion strategy, and establishing participation expectations), discourse facilitation (drawing participants in, establishing areas of agreement and disagreement) and direct instruction (presenting concepts, diagnosing misconceptions). These roles are collectively referred to as ‘teacher presence’: however they do not all have to be taken on by the teacher, as the discussion of student-led discussion shows. Apart from aspects which the teacher may have the main responsibility for (in particular relating to instructional design, and possibly monitoring direct instruction) there are also moderator functions. The moderator of a discussion is something like a ‘social host’ or ‘meeting chairperson’ (Feenberg 1989:33). That moderating makes as many demands on social skills as on knowledge of the material being discussed I would attest from personal experience of moderating online discussions in a distance course: one has to be adept both at reading for social cues and at writing in such a way that social cues are embedded in what one writes without appearing stilted and strained (and possibly without resorting to the dreading emoticons!) . In fact, the social aspect is possibly the greatest demand on the moderator, although this may be specific to discussions conducted entirely in a distance medium, where the participants have no other form of communication with one another.

Feenberg provides the following summary of moderating functions:

Contextualising functions

Opening Discussion: Carefully designed opening comments should announce the theme of the discussion, and identify any shared experiences or symbols which can clarify content and purpose.
Setting Norms: A familiar communication model should be selected to establish tacit expectations about conference behaviour, and to suggest rules of behaviour.
Setting Agenda: The moderator controls the order and flow of discussion topics, and generally shares part or all of the agenda with participants at the outset.

Monitoring functions

Recognition: The moderator refers explicitly to participants to assure them that their contribution is valued and welcome, or to correct misapprehensions about the context of the discussion.
Prompting: To solicit comments from participants, either publicly or through private mail messages; might be formalised as ‘assignments’ in some conferences. Meta-functions
Meta-commenting: To remedy problems in context, norms or agenda, clarity, irrelevance, and information overload.
Weaving: To summarise the state of the discussion and to find unifying threads in participants’ comments; it encourages these participants and implicitly prompts them to pursue their ideas (Feenberg 1989:35).

How many of the functions are actually carried out by moderators depends on the type and context of discussion. More social functions will be needed if the discussion is between participants who do not meet except on the discussion forum. In this case, it is important to do the kind of ‘sharing of experiences’ that announces a presence, in the same way as students would do on arriving in a seminar room, or during breaks. With respect to setting norms, it may be sufficient to include a link to a list of ‘netiquette’ rules; however, as people become more accustomed to the medium, the need for this kind of overt norm-setting will diminish.

At the cognitive level, the most important functions of the moderator during the discussion are the meta-functions. By providing feedback, keeping the discussion on-track, and weaving, the coherence of the discussion is maintained. What is desired is sufficient closure to give the discussion organisation and structure. It is paramount that there is a sense of return, and of messages looping back on other messages, rather than digressing further and further away from the main topic. A further function of the moderator should be that of deciding when a new thread should be started. That is, it is possible and even desirable to prevent all participants from having the option of starting a new thread, as this results in participants being ‘drawn along constantly diverging paths’, rather than being united in a common discussion (Thomas 2002:356). Apart from not making it possible for all participants to start a new thread, two activities are important for maintaining coherence and giving some closure to the discussion: the first is that of weaving, and the second that of summarising. Weaving involves periodically drawing together the messages of the various participants in order to provide a point of engagement between them. Thus if students are not engaging with one another’s messages, the moderator can draw their attention to ways in which they could do so, by modelling the engagement and reflection for them at first, and then by encouraging them to do so for themselves. The second is that of providing a summary, either periodically or at the end of the discussion. Some researchers 28include ‘seeking to reach consensus/understanding’ as one of the responsibilities of teaching presence. Consensus is as important for discussions—and philosophical discussions in particular—as is disagreement or conflict. But if consensus on individual points cannot be reached, consensus on the summary, that is, on what the main points of agreement and disagreement in the discussion have been, is very important. This gives the discussion a goal, an ending point which serves as a provisional closure, or a resting point.

It is also important that the moderator create a space in which students feel safe from the possibility of embarrassment. Firstly, it is a good idea to have a spell-checker included in the discussion tool, so that messages can be checked (possibly automatically) before being sent. Secondly, any taking up of errors and misconceptions needs to be done in a diplomatic way, as there are not the non-verbal cues that might otherwise soften the correction. However, there is a difference here depending on whether the discussion is led by the tutor or by the students themselves. In tutor-led discussions, corrections are going to be just that: corrections; in student-led discussions, there are no corrections as such, only negotiations. It is, however, important that there be some etiquette guidelines as there is scope for misunderstandings and offence on these discussions. This is one reason why, even when tutors do not lead the discussion themselves, and opt for student-led discussions, it is a good idea for them to at least have access to the discussions, and to monitor them.

In the next two sections I discuss two strategies for conducting on-line discussions which seem to me to maximise their potential benefits for the teaching of philosophy in particular. These are (1) student-led discussions and (2) document-centred discussions

5. Student-led discussions

Only well-moderated discussions are successful; moderation however is time-consuming, and could be a daunting task to add an already heavy teaching load. It was also seen that pedagogically, it makes good sense to give students greater responsibility for their own learning. This in turn is encouraged by a more collaborative approach, which encourages students to be active participants in the learning process, as they interact with each other and with the material they are studying. Thus it would seem that removing the tutor at least partially from the discussion would address both the needs of tutors, and those of students. Student-led discussion is one way of achieving this. In this process, students are given responsibility for some of the moderating activities outlined above. Tutors still have responsibility for designing appropriate tasks, topics and questions, but the actual discussion is handed over to the students. This can be implemented either in distance or in face-to-face contexts.

The research into student-led discussions is very similar to that on online discussions: over-ridingly positive, with a few more negative voices. However, I believe that for the purposes of teaching philosophy, the positive outweighs the negative. The positive points are that in student-led discussions, (1) students are more uninhibited about asking questions and challenging the statements of others (Kremer & McGuinness 1998), (2) the students leading the discussion learn the material very effectively, as they tend to feel more responsible for the discussion, and so read assigned reading more carefully (Rourke & Anderson 2002, Ploetzner, Dillenbourg, Preier & Traum 1999), (3) student-led discussions have greater coherence and fluidity (Tagg 1994), (4) achieve higher levels of participation, and (5) student leaders are experienced by participants as being more responsive and interesting, leading to overall more positive attitudes towards computer conferencing (Murphy et al 1996). It is interesting that when students are asked to explain why they believe that the student-led discussion has been beneficial for them, they invoke a kind of social cognitive conflict theory (as described in section 3.1).

Negative points have also been raised, to the effect that there is too much affirmation of each other (the ‘mutual stroking’ mentioned in section 3.2), that there is a predominance of unsupported opinion, and that assumptions do not get questioned (mentioned in section 4); in addition, some students would rather learn from an expert than from peers (Rourke & Anderson 2002:5). However, these particular problems should not occur in properly designed philosophical discussions, which are more directly focused towards the kind of give-and-take characteristic of arguments. Also, the discussions are not primarily for the transmission of information, but rather for learning the ropes of philosophical dialogue, and so there ought not to be a problem associated with lack of expertise in the content of the material. Indeed, Rourke and Anderson found that students’ experiences ‘confirm what is axiomatic in the literature on this topic: discussions are useful in achieving higher-order, but not lower-order learning objectives’ (2002:16).

There are several different models for student-led discussions 29. These can involve students at the same level of study, competence and ability, or at different levels, graduate students working with undergraduate students, or students from different institutions working together. For the purposes of this study, I have concentrated on peer groups consisting of students at the same level of study. When students are drawn from different levels of study, they act as peer tutors, rather than as discussion leaders. There may well be scope for this, just as there is for graduate students to lead undergraduate seminars and other discussion forums, but this is a different aspect of the distribution of teaching roles within a faculty or institution. Furthermore, using students at the same level to act as discussion leaders is more effective for the philosophical skills that we wish to foster in students. In short, we wish to get students to learn to analyse, interpret and put forward arguments. There is good reason to try to get them to develop these skills not only in dialogues with their tutors, but also in dialogues with each other. These two types of dialogue should in fact supplement each other. In dialogue with their tutors, students learn by imitation and modelling. However, in virtue of the tutor-student relationship, the expectation will be that the tutor is right, or knows the next step, or the right kind of moves to make, and that the student is simply not his or her equal. Indeed this is manifestly the case in many a Socratic dialogue, even though these are sometimes taken to be exemplary teaching practice, as Laurillard reminds us (2002:74-5). At best, the argument between tutor and student tends to be a ‘mock’ argument, since the student cannot really hope to persuade (although of course, sometimes they do make tutors see things differently). In arguments with their peers, however, the argument is more ‘for real’: they can persuade others or be persuaded. But in order to be successful, they need to pay attention to what others are saying, learn to analyse and interpret others’ contributions, draw out the implications thereof and reflect on how—or whether—to modify or adjust their own position. On-line discussions are a very good forum for learning philosophy by doing it. If students are to do philosophy on these discussions, it seems that there is no better way than for the tutor to retreat (although not completely) and let them get on with it.

Philosophy seems to be particularly well-suited to generating the kind of topics that will allow for ‘structured academic controversies’ (Falchikov 2001:57-8). Discussions that are structured around arguments have an immediate focus (which should in itself make them more coherent), and it is relatively easy to assign clear roles to students participating in the discussion (proponents and opponents of positions, initiators and summarisers, devil’s advocates and defenders). Discussions designed in this way force students to reflect upon and engage with others’ contributions, instead of being an inconclusive free-for-all.

The roles and responsibilities of setting up, maintaining, leading and concluding discussions can be divided up in various ways. Teachers have overall responsibility for instructional design and organisation; they are also responsible for monitoring the discussion, even while not taking a hands-on role, as well as for giving students recognition and reassurance30, and being available to guide discussion leaders when this is required; possibly, they can also give an assessment of the discussion at the end, giving feedback on its broad outlines, or any common misconceptions that may have occurred. They also need to make clear to discussion leaders and to participants what is expected of them, and where appropriate, assign roles.

Different models for discussion can be used. Generally, smaller groups (10 to 12 students) are better for online discussions, but the size depends on the nature of the discussion. Discussions for which participation is compulsory should be divided into groups, whereas non-compulsory discussions should have a larger number of participants, as not all will be active. In addition, a definite time-frame for the discussion needs to be instituted, since this provides an impetus for participation, and also serves as a kind of closure. One of the problems with engagement is that sometimes a participant will contribute to a thread long after others have moved on from it, and so receives no response and may drop out of the conversation. Setting a time-frame can also be done in different ways, for example, by setting a time-frame for a particular topic (one or two weeks), or closing discussion on the threads of a particular time-period. Elapsed threads then become read-only.

Leadership roles are assigned where there are more than two students. In larger groups, either one student leads discussion, or teams of students do so. Students can be assigned the activities associated with facilitating discussions, as well as some of the instructional activities set out in the following table (Rourke & Anderson 2002:8):

Roles Responsibilities
Instructional design and organization
  • Setting curriculum
  • Designing methods
  • Establishing time parameters
  • Utilizing medium effectively
  • Establishing ‘netiquette’*
  • Making macro-level comments about course content
Facilitating discourse
  • Identifying areas of agreement/ disagreement*
  • Seeking to reach consensus/ understanding*·
  • Encouraging, acknowledging, or reinforcing student contributions*
  • Setting climate for learning
  • Drawing in participants, prompting discussion [in particular, encouraging participants to reply to each other—AC]*
  • Assess the efficacy of the process
Direct instruction
  • Presenting content
  • Focusing the discussion on specific issues*
  • Summarizing the discussion*
  • Confirming understanding through assessment and explanatory feedback
  • Diagnosing misconceptions
  • Injecting knowledge from diverse sources
[* indicates responsibilities that can be taken on by student leaders]

 

5.1 Models for discussion

(1) Students assigned these responsibilities will need some guidance in how to carry them out. One way of getting students to learn how to do this is to start off by using the discussions to supplement face-to-face seminars. For example, a discussion topic is set for a seminar; students have one week to post preliminary input for the discussion on a discussion board, in the form of questions or comments. One student is given the task of summarising the input on the discussion board. At the seminar itself, the leader introduces significant ideas and points for discussion, drawing on the input, making connections or drawing contrasts. The leader is also responsible for facilitating the discussion in the face-to-face seminar, drawing in as many perspectives as possible and getting the group to explore the issues and ideas in a structured manner. Once the seminar is over, either the same student, or a different student is asked to provide a summary of the seminar discussion; the summary is posted onto the discussion board, and other students are invited to give or withhold their consent from it. Perhaps another student may feel that a point raised in discussion has not been dealt with properly in the summary and point this out. There may therefore be some further discussion regarding the summary of the discussion with is geared towards obtaining consensus from the group: if not consensus on every point, at least consensus of what the main point of disagreement might be. In this way, the discussion has a form of closure. Discussions of different seminars can also be compared and contrasted, for example, by linking the issues raised in different seminars. These discussion then becomes a course archive, which students can go over as they write their essays31. In a more ambitious project, essays too can be posted onto the course site, which students participate in building up. On this conception, the discussion board is but one of the tools available on a course site: other tools would be such as to allow students to post notices as well as their essays, or examples, or anything else they may see as contributing to the course.

Using online discussion to supplement face-to-face discussions in this way can be a good way of easing students into discussions that are held purely online; or perhaps, the combination will be found to be sufficient in itself. By combining the two forms of discussion, many of the benefits of online discussion are still to be had (such as getting students to formulate their ideas in a text-based but not essay-writing form, geared towards others students as their primary addressees); in addition, the seminars themselves are enhanced, as all students will have already contributed something, and will have been forced to think about the discussion beforehand—and again, afterwards, when they consider the summary of the discussion.

(2) Another way of helping students to lead discussion in the absence of supplementation by face-to-face seminars is by simply outlining to them what is expected of them: for example:

  1. Post a welcome message and explain the assignment to participants.
  2. Raise some preliminary issues, and elicit responses.
  3. Post feedback to messages posted by participants; either individually or weave several messages together.
  4. Compare and contrast messages, pointing out agreements and disagreements;
  5. Invite participants to respond to each other.
  6. Start new threads, as and when appropriate.
  7. Elicit responses from individual participants (‘so and so has disagreed with you, how will you respond?’)
  8. Raise further points that participants have not raised.
  9. Summarise the discussion at the end, and post the discussion on the board to see whether participants agree with your summary.
  10. Deal with any issues raised from your summary.

Teams can do this, as well as individuals. For example, one person can be given responsibility for 1) and 2); one or more for 3)–8); and another for 9) and 10). There is, however, possibly more coherence if one person or pairs take responsibility for the whole process. In this case, a strict time duration must be imposed on the discussion, or the period of time for which any individual or team is responsible for the whole discussion must be divided into manageable time units.

(3) A further way of conducting these discussions is by assigning roles to students, although this must not be done in an overly rigid way, as it tends to block dialogue. One type of role-taking that immediately presents itself is that of getting one student to take on the role of teacher for another (or others), with swapping of roles. This type of assignment is based on the premise that teaching is probably one of the best ways of learning; the student who is in the learning role also needs to be active in asking questions, pointing out unclarities, asking for reformulations, putting forward interpretations and drawing out the implications of what the other has said, and so on. They then swap roles32.

Pre-assigning roles may seem to be excessively authoritarian; however it is also makes it easier for many students to participate as they feel they are not so much exposing themselves as acting a role. It also gives them a way to start without agonising too much about what they have to say: they simply need to say something that will fit their role, at least to start off with. Thus, if a student is assigned the role of proponent of a claim, he or she simply needs to think about what it would take to propose the claim in the first place. However, roles can sometimes be too dogmatically enforced, or too narrowly defined. For example, on one model:

The roles in this model are very narrow and rigid. Another possibility is to work with a semi-structured interface, which has pre-defined buttons, based on speech act theory, so that students tag their input with the type of speech act they are performing—for example: ‘I propose to … ’ (Dillenbourg 1999:8). However, although I am saying this in the absence of empirical research, I feel that this too is to overspecify roles. The discussion has to maintain a balance between structure and fluidity.

Ideally, philosophy teachers will want discussions to get students to explore philosophical positions, and to develop philosophical skills. Where pre-assigned roles are used, I feel that it is more effective to group students simply into debating positions: proponents and opponents (or consequentialists and deontologists; internalists and externalists about justification; Cartesians and Humeans on the self, foundationalists and coherentists on knowledge—there is no dearth of possibilities in philosophy). Again, these roles can be assigned to individuals or teams. Students can either choose their own groups, or be assigned to them. The difference is that self-chosen groups may be too homogenous to generate productive conflict, and may turn out too be too friendly or social; it is important to have a variety of viewpoints and abilities in a group, which the teacher will be more likely to have a better idea of than the students themselves. It is also a good idea to have students sometimes defending positions with which they are not naturally sympathetic. Being thus grouped means that students explore the position that they are defending, and understand it better as they defend it to others. In defending the position, they will formulate and reformulate the claims of the position, deal with counterarguments, and counterevidence, learn to use examples and analogies, and generally gain practice in basic philosophical skills. The basic strategies of philosophical argumentation can be listed alongside the list of expectations of participants in online discussions, in order to remind students of the options available to them in formulating their contributions and counter-responses. Thus, students will have an explicit set of guidelines, both for how to participate in and/or lead online discussions, and strategies they can use in formulating their messages.

Assigning students roles in this way is one way of instituting a structured academic controversy. This way of dealing with discussion can be done simply with pairs of students, and thus may require no leadership as such. In this type of assignment, two students each argue for a particular point of view. If this is set as a joint assignment for assessment purposes, the results could be very good. Indeed maximal participation could be achieved in this way, with minimum input from the teacher. One drawback of this method is that it does not give students the wide range of perspectives that they could get from a bigger group; also, the two students would have to be more-or-less equally matched for either to be gaining the full benefit. However, this is an easy and effective way of using the medium, and gaining many of the benefits of text-based collaboration.

With teams, there will be a wider range of perspectives, and there will also be the advantage of many students working together in order to come to the best possible formulation of a philosophical position, working off each others insights (hopefully, the result will be as with children working in teams to play Mastermind (p.6)). As mentioned, it is not necessary that students actually agree with the position they are to explore and/or to defend; indeed it is sometimes a good exercise to get them to speak on behalf of a position with which they are not particularly sympathetic. As soon as there are groups of students working together, it is a good idea to have discussion leaders, or the discussion tends to become incoherent and dispersed. Here are two models for instituting this:

1. There is one discussion in which all students participate; all students are teamed into positions, except for the discussion leader, who acts as a kind of referee. The leader carries out all the moderating functions listed above. There could also be two leaders for such discussions, with one having the main responsibility for initiating discussion, and the other for summarising.

2. There are parallel discussions for each position, or discussion streams, and each team explores the position they will defend as fully as possible. Each team has a leader, who then submits the best points of the discussion to a joint discussion. Team members confer on responses in their own discussion streams. These discussion streams could be open or closed to members of the other team for the duration of the discussion (something like playing cards with an open or closed hand), but should be open to all at the end of the discussion. This form of discussion combines a more overtly consensus driven aspect in the work done by teams in arriving at the best formulation of the position they are defending, and a more overtly ‘adversarial’ aspect, when the teams act as opponents in a debate.

These then, are some of the methods that can be used for student-led discussions in philosophy. Even though they are student-led, and so will rely on students carrying out many of the moderating functions, teachers will need to monitor the discussions closely, ‘looking in’ on them regularly, and providing encouragement where necessary, or helping to keep the discussion on track. Teachers may wish to communicate privately with discussion leaders to help them regain control over the discussion if this is necessary. However, it is best for students to feel that the space of the discussion is their own, while at the same time having the sense of its occurring within the normal teaching framework. How much teacher involvement occurs will depend too on the level of study of the students: graduate students will probably need far less overseeing than undergraduate students.

All of these discussion possibilities can be used in distance or in face-to-face contexts, with variations where appropriate. The use of online discussion to supplement face-to-face meetings where these are part of a distance programme can be very effective for making the best possible use of the relatively infrequent face-to-face meetings included in distance programmes. They also help to establish and to sustain a sense of a community of learners among distance students.

6. Document-centred discussion

There is a further discussion technique which I believe to be very useful for philosophical discussions, and this is document-based discussion. In this form of discussion, students collaborate to analyse and interpret a document. This is made possible by having annotation software, which allows for a text to be presented and annotated in an online environment, and for participants to share comments, in that they can view and respond to one another’s comments.

There are several ways to present and annotate text in an online environment. In any VLE, it is easy enough to post texts or extracts of texts onto web-sites, for which they can then provide an online reading-guide. So, for example, one can simply use Microsoft Front Page to generate an annotated text—or even Microsoft Word. What does, however, require more sophisticated software is building in the interactivity which allows several people to make their own annotations and share them.

Before discussing the strategies that can be used for using these tools, an outline of why they are worth pursuing will be given.

Firstly, online documents, in principle at least, invite highly interactive, dynamic reading (as mentioned in section 3.2):

A central reason for the success of the Web is that it extends familiar notions from the world of paper documents to the world of interactive information systems. In fact, the Web is re-defining what documents are and how they are used and is transforming the author-reader relationship. Documents are changing from static artifacts produced by a few people for consumption by many people, to dynamic, interactive artifacts that can be produced and used by the same group of people (Brown and Duguid, 1996, quoted in Sturgill & Martin, 1999).

These documents are presented in a linked fashion, which allows for different ways of navigating through them. This invites the reader to take responsibility for the way in which they structure and organise the text. However, I’ve already mentioned that this may also lead to incoherence and superficiality, as readers skim from link to link, rather than really engage.

There are however ways to focus attention on the document, and in turn, to use the document to focus a discussion. Firstly, the text can be presented within a relatively closed space, for example, a departmental or course web-site, with only selected links to other web-sites. Secondly, in an annotated text, the links will be to the annotations (primarily but not exclusively: this depends on how much open-endedness is wanted). Thirdly, there are different ways of handling the annotations. One way of presenting on-line documents is to embed the document in an online environment with annotations by the teacher alone. This is a way of presenting a reading-guide to students. Annotations of different types can be included (and how many or how complete they are will depend on how much text is presented): for example, a glossary of terms and definitions; questions or comments relating to specific sentences; analyses of whole paragraphs or sections, for example, reconstructing arguments; comparisons and links to other sections of the text, or to other philosophical documents, and directing students to other resources, ranging from online lectures or lecture outlines, to the whole Web.

Hypertext consists of linked texts, whereas hypermediated text consists of text and other media. A very good example of a philosophy hypermediated text for pedagogical purposes is one which (until recently) presented Plato’s Apology34. The text is web-based and consists not only of annotations, but of a range of facilities, embedded within a wider educational framework, incorporating email and discussion facilities, syllabi, handouts, paper topics, presentation slides and assignments. As the designers of the site, Craig Bach and Mark Manion point out, the user interface is often ‘one of the least developed aspects of most web-based philosophical works’ (2001:50), leading to an impoverished and unsatisfactory online reading experience. On this site, the interface is uncluttered and functional, driven by the constructivist-collaborativist pedagogical principles described earlier in this study, rather than by the technology itself. One of the best features of this site is its division into two different reading levels, the first of which provides links to definitions of terms as the cursor moves over unfamiliar terms in the text, as well as an overview of the structure of the text; the second of which provides analyses of passages (in effect, showing students how philosophical analyses are done), and further questions. Thus students are both presented with exemplary reading practices, on which they can then model there own independent reading practices, and encouraged to read in a dynamic and interactive way.

It is also a useful feature of such sites that they can embed texts within the history of philosophy, by linking the texts to appropriate history sites, as well as to other texts and documents to which they can be compared and contrasted, thus making students more aware of the tradition which forms the background of the texts they read. This would be a very useful supplement to the predominantly analytical training that UK philosophy students get, and would constitute at least a beginning of greater historical awareness.

The Apology site is unidirectional in that it allows the designer the site—the teacher—to make annotations, but not the student. This in itself can be a very useful teaching aid, particular for texts that are repeatedly used for teaching. It can also be done in a less high-tech way than in the Apology site, by using a simple annotation or commentary tool. This way of presenting texts is however better suited for short texts, or extracts (except possibly for the very dedicated!) as making the annotations is labour-intensive. One would also want to choose texts that one knows will be made good use of, by oneself and others. There is scope, here, for teachers of philosophy to contribute to a repository of annotated texts to be used for teaching purposes.

Document-centred discussions are different, as the annotations are made by the participants in the discussion, rather than by the teacher, or the teacher alone. Indeed, the most effective way of using them may be having part of a text annotated by the teacher in order to provide a model of philosophical reading practices, and another part to be annotated by discussants. In an ideal case, interactivity would be built into the kind of site developed by Bach and Manion (and indeed the site is now being developed in order to allow for this), so that it can be used as the basis of document-centred discussion.

Document-centred discussion develops all the same skills as online discussions, but has the further advantage of providing a natural focus for the discussion. It also keeps students focused on a piece of exemplary philosophical writing (though texts do have to be carefully chosen), which will be a springboard for their own writing and text-based discussion35. At the same time, it should also serve to develop students’ interpretational skills, as they are forced to consider different interpretations to their own in the face of which they need to either modify or justify their own. In this way, they are also trained in basic interpretational methods, and in learning what such justification consists in. This in itself is an important practice of philosophy. Indeed, reading, writing and interpreting philosophical texts are all ways of doing philosophy, or are all practices of philosophy which are combined in document-centred discussion. In such discussions, students get feedback on an aspect of their practice which is normally hidden, or carried out in private study time36.

Annotation tools normally split the page between the document and discussion, creating a frame for each, with links between them, so that clicking on a link in the document frame (an icon, an outline or an embedded link indicated by a different colour font) takes one to the associated comment or annotation in the discussion frame. Some annotation tools create a link from the document to annotations which open in a new window or from discussions to document (CoNote). However, it seems that coherence between document and discussion is maintained better by having a split page.

One of the most important issues when considering annotation tools is the level at which they allow for annotation to occur. Microsoft Word, for example, allows comments to be associated with blocks of text of any length—from a single character, to a whole paragraph, or more. Annotation tools differ as to the granularity that they support. For example, the tool used by the Journal for Interactive Media in Education (JIME) divides the document into sections, and comments and discussion are linked to whole sections. WebAnn (a Microsoft plug-in, described in Bernheim Brush et al 2002), and the Annotator tool developed at the University of Texas, as part of its Critical Tools suite of technological aids for teaching38, both allow for annotations linked with specific words and phrases. Below is the WebAnn interface: [INSERT IMAGE HERE] On this interface, each participant is associated with a different colour, with which they outline the part of the text that they have commented upon. This is perhaps not the best way of achieving this, as has been noted by the designers, who are considering using lines in the margin, or some other means of indicating which parts of the document have been annotated. Another tool which similarly allows for fine granularity (up to line level) is that used by the Pragglejaz group for metaphor studies39. On this site—which is devoted to poetry, and so appears in a line by line format— text that has been annotated is indicated by a small triangle, and all discussion relating to it appears below the line, when the ‘show comments’ option is used. This is an especially clear way of embedding discussion into text, although it may be particularly suited to poetry.

These differences of granularity have an impact on discussion. Although sometimes the possibility of making highly specific comments is useful, it can also lead to the discussion being too fragmentary. This is also in line with the nature of interpretation, which requires shifting focus between detail and overall structure. The JIME interface allows for commentary on each section of the document, as well as general commentary on the whole document. Dividing the document into sections also makes it more easily readable online. One of the standard difficulties with presenting text online is that, at least thus far, it seems that readers do prefer hard copy. Even in the case of the Apology hypermediated texts, students had a tendency to print out the text rather than to read it online, reserving this only for access to annotations and other links. And similarly, in the study conducted by designers of the WebAnn system, students tended to print out the document, comment on the hard copy, and then transfer their annotations to the web-site. This in itself is not a severe impediment, so long as discussions remain anchored in the document; however it is time-consuming and seems to obviate many of the benefits of interactive reading which supposedly come with hypertext. It seems to me that it is a good idea not to place large tracts of text on the web-site, but rather shorter, quite dense or key, extracts, which are read on-line as well as in hard copy. This should also be better for keeping the discussion more focused, both with respect to subject matter, and time. This is particularly the case for undergraduate students; graduate students would probably gain more from having articles or chapters as the focus of discussion. In this case, however, the document should be divided into sections, possibly following the ‘3 click’ rule: that is, no page should take longer than 3 clicks to scroll from beginning to end.

A further problem with the annotation software that is needed for interactive shared annotations is that it may not run on students’ home computers, but only on appropriately configured campus computers. Access then becomes more difficult, and may curtail discussion.

 

6.1 Document-centred discussion: some guidelines

As with student-led discussion, document-centred discussion requires structure and organisation. Moderation remains pivotal to the success of the discussion. This could be done on the student-led model discussed above, although it is likely to present the discussion leader with quite a challenge. If student-leadership—that is, by students who are at the same level of study as participants—is opted for, this should occur within a well-supported environment, in which the teacher provides the broader framework, possibly annotates some of the text him- or herself, or provides leading questions to initiate discussion. In the absence of such support from the teacher, this is possibly a good discussion model into which to introduce leadership of undergraduates by graduates or other teaching assistants, if the instructor cannot do it him- or herself. Philosophical texts are dense, and there are often several different and sometimes competing interpretations, between which it will not be obvious which are better or more plausible, and on what grounds. These texts cannot be isolated from their broader context, and so need a person with some knowledge of the context to guide the interpretations of others. But for the same reason, they are ideal for real collaborations, as they provide plenty of scope for negotiation.

In the case of an annotation tool that supports different levels of annotation, from specific words, phrases or lines to paragraphs or sections, leading questions can be as specific or as general as is desired; a range of questions is preferable, getting students to switch focus between detail and broader structural features. The questions can be divided into exegetical questions (‘What is meant by x?’, ‘Is this an argument?’ ‘What view is being targeted here?’) and evaluative questions (‘Is this feasible?’). Leading questions are the start of a discussion thread; however it is important not to proliferate threads excessively for the reasons discussed above. It is also important that each thread does not develop in isolation from the others, since the aim is to help students come to an interpretation of the document as a whole. Here, the role of the discussion leader (student or other) is very important, for example, in weaving the different threads together, and in providing summaries.

Document-centred discussions seem to be particularly good as a supplement to face-to-face seminars, as they will ensure that students have thought about the document to be discussed, and considered others’ interpretations as well as some of the questions raised by their own. In addition, the face-to-face seminar provides a natural way of summarising and bringing a form of closure to the on-line discussion, which in the case of a document, may be more challenging for students than issue or topic based discussions. Again, this depends on the level of the student, graduate students probably coping better with this type of discussion purely online.

 

Some further factors to be considered

Teachers need to decide whether participation in an online discussion is to be compulsory. This seems to negate the reasons for using these resources based on their allegedly non-authoritarian character. In an ideal situation, coercion would not be required, but in the real world of higher learning, it is unfortunately true that students often need to be compelled to do what is good for them. This does not solve all participation problems, since only some minimal or moderate level of participation can be made compulsory, but it does go some way to solving them. If participation is compulsory, teachers will need to consider on what basis: that is, will it be part of students’ attendance requirements (if these are already an aspect of the institutional or departmental system) or of assessment.

If the second, then teachers will need to decide on the basis of assessment. An advantage of text-based communication is that the discussion is readily available to teachers for assessment. However, there are several assessment issues that must be addressed. Because these are collaborative discussions, it is not simply up to individuals how good their own contributions will be, as in part this will depend on the dialogue itself. The collaborative nature of these discussions results in a shared object—as discussed in section 3.2—which may have many pedagogical advantages, but does not make individual assessment easy. Group assessment, on the other hand, ignores the possibly unequal input of individuals, and can lead to tensions within groups. A combination of group and individual assessment may be the answer here, a mark being allocated for the overall discussion, and another for individual input, and then combining the two on a 50/50 basis, or some similar formula. Such a combined mark means that students need to be sufficiently committed to the group to ensure an overall good discussion, while providing them with the security that they will not be penalised excessively for others’ under-performance, and at the same time, making them responsible for their own performance.

In addition, teachers need to decide how much should be made explicit to students at the outset of discussions. For example, normally netiquette rules are posted onto the discussion site: what should they contain, and what, if any, will be the consequences for not adhering to them? These rules are by now quite standard (no obscenities, no discriminatory remarks, capitals indicate shouting and shouldn’t be used, etc.) but in fact, there is more of a tendency for participants to be too polite on discussions than not. However, teachers may want to list some discussion strategies, such as acknowledging and engaging with other participants’ messages, not writing overly long messages (perhaps an average length should be stipulated); as well as with some philosophical strategies (perhaps an outline of some basic critical reasoning skills). However, generally it is a good idea to say only what must be said, and not to over-specify things in advance.

The following is a check-list of some of the decisions that must be made by tutors who wish to use student-led discussion:

  1. What kind of discussion model to use (some possibilities were outlined in section 5): in particular, will roles be pre-assigned, if so, which, what role will the discussion leader have, how many of the moderating functions will the discussion leader carry out, how many leaders and for which functions?
  2. How many students to a group, and how or by whom will membership in the groups be decided?
  3. What kind of assignment will be set for the discussion: what topic or question?
  4. How will the discussion be related to the rest of the course: will it be a stand-alone discussion or will it supplement face-to-face discussions. If so, how.
  5. How much will be made explicit on the discussion site: for example, netiquette rules and what will they include), some basic discussion strategies, some basic philosophical strategies.
  6. Who may start a new thread, and under what conditions (for example, only after conferring with the discussion leader?)
  7. What will be the time frame for the discussion? At what point does the discussion or parts of the discussion become read only?
  8. How will the discussion be embedded into the course web site, if there is one?
  9. Will participation in the discussion be compulsory? If so, how many postings will be compulsory?
  10. Will participation be assessed? How will assessment fit in with other assessment strategies used in the course?

A document-centred discussion requires much the same range of decisions, but also requires more initial work from the tutor, in particular in terms of choosing the text or extract to be discussed, deciding on how much commentary or guidance (if any) to include, and deciding on the initial questions to start off discussion threads. It also requires technological assistance, especially as, at this point, interactive annotation software is not a standard feature of VLEs, and must be imported as a plug-in, and the appropriate system configuration installed.

 

Conclusion

There is much evidence to indicate that on-line technologies serve the purposes of sound educational principles, allowing opportunities for active, responsible learning, for developing higher-level cognitive skills, and for students to enter into the discursive domain of the discipline they are studying. On-line technologies do not only extend resources that are already available to teachers, providing more possibilities for collaboration and interaction; rather, they do so in a highly specific way, due in particular to the text-based nature of the medium, and the oral-written discourse which is characteristic of it. These aspects of on-line technologies are particularly appropriate for fostering skills of analysis, argument and interpretation, and so should be of especial interest to teachers of philosophy. Using these technologies effectively will at first be an onerous task; I hope to have laid out some of the reasons why it is worth doing so.

Endnotes

  1. For example, Harasim (1995) and Harasim (2001), Falchikov (2001), Dillenbourg (1999), Blumenfeld, Marx, Soloway & Krajcik (1996).
  2. As set forth in Whittle, Morgan & Maltby (2000).
  3. See for example Knowlton (2002), Whittle, Morgan & Maltby (2000).
  4. I have retained Laurillard’s term ‘representation’ to refer to entire range of symbolic systems in which academic knowledge is expressed and formulated. For our purposes, obviously linguistic representations as the most important. I have sometimes used the term ‘discourse’ to indicate a communal or social dimension of a representational system.
  5. For this section I have relied greatly on Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982).
  6. This is based on studies by A.R. Luria of illiterate people, described in Ong (1982:50-2).
  7. Olson describes this as ‘assigning an appropriate illocutionary force to an expression or representation’ (1994: 279).
  8. This need not be construed in the Derridean sense of writing as a rival to intention and thought in the determination of the meaning of an utterance.
  9. The minimum is what I take to be desirable for students of philosophy in order to cultivate in them a sense of the importance of scholarship in a department which does not have a highly historicist bent. For such departments, obviously a richer background knowledge will be desirable.
  10. In the terminology of Mikhail Bakhtin.
  11. See Taliaferro & Chance (1991).
  12. See Gordon Graham (1999).
  13. But see Garth Kemerling (2002).
  14. In the terminology of Roman Jakobson, the phatic function of a communication situation ensures that contact is ongoing. For example, utterances such as ‘Can you hear me?’ have a phatic function.
  15. See Ferrara, Brunner and Whittemore (1991:10).
  16. See Tsui & Wing (2002).
  17. For example, see Herring (1996b).
  18. See for example Thomas (2002:352).
  19. Although this responsibility is not absolute. See Floridi (1999:117-129) on hypertexts
  20. In fact, this is a global feature of the Web as such: in principle, anyone can have a web-site.
  21. Not surprisingly: closure and structure go hand-in-hand, as Roland Barthes has shown (1990).
  22. See Feenberg (1989); Kolb (1996); Yates (1996); Ferrara, K., Brunner, H., Whittemore, G. (1991).
  23. In Jakobson’s terminology, the cognitive function of an utterance is its orientation towards eliciting a response from the addressee.
  24. Of which 40 females, 29 males; 83% under the age of 25; most students had good experience with computers and with the internet.
  25. For example, Harrington & Hathaway point out that ‘Conferencing activities do appear to be uniquely suited for generating discussions of taken-for-granted assumptions … In particular, [they] seem especially suited to helping students notice how what they fail to notice shapes their thoughts and deeds’ (1994:552).
  26. This also motivates the drive to find different ways of analysing the content of messages for ‘cognitive presence’, for which taxonomies such as the SOLO taxonomy do not always yield the right results. See for example Garrison, Anderson & Archer (2001).
  27. Walter Ong has many interesting things to say about the ‘cultivated spontaneity’ and ‘self-conscious group-mindedness’ of secondary orality that is a feature of the electronic age (2002:133-5).
  28. Such as Rourke & Anderson (2002:8).
  29. See Falchikov (2001) for a very comprehensive overview or models.
  30. Tagg points out that these roles are more effective when carried out by the teacher (1994:47).
  31. The idea for this form of discussion was taken from Susan Spearey, ‘Bridging Distances, Breaking Boundaries: Teaching South African Literature in Canada with the Aid of Web CT Technology’ (forthcoming).
  32. See Falchikov (2001: 20-22) for more on reciprocal teaching, and Ploetzner et al (1999) for more on why this works.
  33. Morgan, M.C., (n.d.) ‘Guiding Online Discussions: A Social Argument Framework’.
  34. The site was hosted by Drexel University (http://www.drexel.edu), however, at the time of publication it is unavailable. Check the university for information. The features of the site are explained and outlined in Bach & Manion (2001).
  35. In fact, it will be interesting to see what effect, if any, this has on the tone and register of discussion.
  36. See also Laurillard (2002:151-154) for a discussion of the way in which this document-centred discussion enhances teaching precisely because it allows for intrinsic feedback on practice rather than only on description of practice.
  37. See Bernheim Brush et al (2002) for more on some of the available annotation tools.
  38. At http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~criticaltools. The tools are free downloads, but require a UNIX server.
  39. Described by Schoonenboom (2002), and viewable at: http://www.let.vu.nl/groups/pragglejaz.nsf/Round%201?OpenFrameset

Bibliography

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