On Monday in class we conducted an online debate using chat. The topic was focused around the negatives and positives of E-Learning and the debate worked a bit like a digital conversation. There were two teams, one positive and one negative, and I was one of the adjudicators. The whole process frustrated me very much because everyone could participate and no one had ‘the floor’. There needed to be one person talking at a time and not tem people whiting short one or two word statements.
When told that I could set down some ground rules, I asked people to make sure that they wrote more than three words at a time. Although this rule was good in theory, people began to interrupt the structured debate format with silly statements, which created ‘chat chaos’. It didn’t help that we were all in the room together while doing this, because talking accompanied thought about what to write about during the chat session.
