The Lost Art of Discourse

and the

Unrealized Promise in Distance Education

W. R. Klemm

Professor of Neuroscience

Texas A&M University

4458 TAMU

College Station, TX 77843-4458

E-mail: wklemm@cvm.tamu.edu

Abstract

We live in a soap-box world where reasoned discourse is being drowned out by shouts of bloggers, talk-show hosts, TV talking heads, letters to the editor, and sound-bite politics,. Our people are increasingly disinclined to read, listen, reflect, and learn from the insights of others. Although everybody has an equal right to their opinions, not all opinions are equally informed or intelligent. One task of education is to teach students how to develop opinions based on reasoned discourse, a task that is made more difficult by an anti-intellectual popular culture. Distance education affords a possible remedy because it has asynchronous collaboration tools that can, when properly used, facilitate proper discourse. Yet this promise goes largely unrealized, because teachers themselves seem not to appreciate how much we have lost of the art of reasoned discourse. Here, I hope to show how distance education technology can be deployed in systematic ways that help students to move beyond spouting of opinions to a spirit of inquiry, evidence gathering, analysis, creative synthesis, and conclusion-making based on written discourse with others.

Soapbox Culture

These days, it seems as if everybody has an opinion ― and they want to make sure you know about it. An abundance of soapbox venues makes it all too easy for anyone to spout their views. Consider the magnitude of blogging. Some 12 million adult Americans operate a blog site, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Of these, 82% of the bloggers say they expect to still be operating their blogs a year from now. Then there is the mind-boggling popularity of MySpace (over 60 million personal profiles), where youngsters seek out a platform to parade their experiences and views on seemingly every conceivable subject.

The associated trend is that many people are becoming loners. This trend was first captured in the famous book by Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone. He mustered impressive data to document that, as one reviewer put it, “the United States has lost much of the social glue that once allowed our society to cohere, that we are becoming a nation of strangers to one another.” In the world of public-school education, roughly 1/3 of adolescents drop out of school, an extreme indication of the preference to “go it alone.” Putnam points out that there is almost a straight-line correlation between a wholesome childhood and what he calls “social capital.” States (such as the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Vermont, Minnesota) where residents trust others, join organizations, volunteer, vote, and socialize, are the same states where young people are less likely to drop out of school. States where there is less social capital, particularly in many Southern states, youngsters are much more likely to be troubled. Without a background of social capital, children grow up with a dislike for working with others. the “bowling alone” syndrome is widespread, differing only in degree by geography, and may be increasingly exacerbated by electronic technology. When students are not using the Internet as a soapbox, they shut themselves off from the outside world with their iPods, videogames, and Internet surfing. Unfortunately, this isolation does not include much reading.

A marked decline in literary reading in the United States was discovered in a survey by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA, 2004). In 1992, 72.6 million adults in the U. S. did not read a single book. By 2002, that figure had increased to 89.9 million, the NEA said. The three youngest groups surveyed showed the greatest decline in reading, a 55% greater decline than in the adult population, a statistic that does not bode well for the future of education. In the U.S. in 2002, there were the same number of readers as there were 10 years earlier, despite the fact that the population had risen by 40 million (Giola, 2004). Industry analyst, Jim Milliot laments, “Where Have All the Readers Gone? And Where Can We Find New Ones?"—that was the theme for the Association of American Publishers' 2006 annual meeting in New York. At the end of the day, the not surprising conclusion was that reading is losing out to electronic alternatives. This pernicious trend may not yet have caught on in all counties, but it is just a matter of time.

It is also not surprising that best-selling books are those dominated by religion, a genre dominated by self-preoccupation and by opinion, not fact. Book Industry Trends projects that publisher revenues will increase 18.3 percent over the next five years, but this growth will be driven by an over 50% increase in sales of books with religious themes (BISG Press Release, 2005).

An Educational Imperative

Given the growing social isolation and self-absorption, it seems imperative for educators to help students learn the value of learning and working with others. In the workplace, discourse provides the mechanism by which workers generate ideas, reach decisions, make plans for service or product development and marketing, and evaluate services and products.

People use discourse for many purposes, but a comprehensive list would include:

· Present information and ideas

· Inform others

· Motivate

· Engage others in shared thought

· Explain

· Persuade others

· Accomplish goals and tasks

Educational practice that does not develop these social and communication skills is a disservice to students. Teaching of these skills is optimized by learning environments that require written discourse.

Written discourse has special impact because writing engages author and readers with content more rigorously than does speaking. Written discourse is always available for inspection, reflection, and refinement. Value comes from cooperative conversation in the service of creative enterprise. Written discourse promotes “listening,” where the reader is invited to register information objectively, to flexibly reformulate one’s own understanding and positions, and to incorporate the ideas of others into insightful analysis. Requiring students to conduct discourse in writing increases the odds that they will organize facts and ideas more coherently and with logical rigor and that argumentation will be more persuasive. Both the reading and the writing increase focus and encourage students to stay on task.

Educators now have electronic tools that can promote social and communication skills, though these are most often employed (and misused) in distance education courses. I am referring to Internet software that supports asynchronous communication. Most distance educators assign high priority to community building, because of the isolation and relative lack of social support in distance education environments. Asynchronous communication tools can greatly enrich learning in traditional teaching environments.

The asynchronous nature that on-line technologies make possible provide a way to enrich the usual nature of learning discourse. In a regular classroom, even one where discussion is encouraged, student commentary is sequential and transient. Students speak one at a time and the ideas are not preserved. In asynchronous on-line environments, everybody can speak (write) at once, and all ideas are always available for inspection and reflection. My colleague, Jim Snell, and I have briefly reviewed the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the various asynchronous on-line technologies (e-mail, list serves, threaded-discussion boards, and what we called Shared Document Collaboration Conferencing (SDCC) (Klemm and Snell, 1994).

Hewitt (2001) has written a stinging critique of teaching with asynchronous bulletin boards. The very nature of such threaded-topic boards “provide few facilities for drawing together discourse in meaningful ways.” There is no convenient capacity to cut across the hierarchical structure of a class conference for stimulating what he calls “convergent” discourse, where the assorted notes are used to synthesize or summarize ideas. He reports some interesting data from three graduate-level courses that used threaded-topic discussion boards. Of the 830 posted notes that were analyzed, only 2% even attempted convergence. Paradoxically, all students said they would benefit from higher levels of synthesis and summarization. Yet, 81% admitted that they personally never made such attempts, and 75% said that they never considered the notion of synthesizing and summarizing across different note postings.

Lack of convergent discourse is just one of the problems with bulletin boards. Some of the problem is created by instructors who accept spouting of opinion, rather than requiring students to DO something useful in asynchronous Internet communication systems. For example, teachers could use the Internet environment to help student learning teams apply what they are learning. Learning is enriched when a student group is required to make an informed decision, develop a plan, conduct a project, write a report, conduct a case study, construct a portfolio, or perform most of the other kinds of constructivist activities that rigorous student-student interaction can enable. Group-based project learning is especially valuable training, because in today’s world, teamwork is how most work gets done, whether in military operations, a law firm, industrial services, corporate product development, or in a scientific research lab.

Discussion boards do not facilitate the key pedagogical elements of building learning communities: collaborative learning activities that demand data collection, analysis, and convergent thinking that is performed in the service of a constructivist task that creates educational deliverables. We teachers like to say that we want our students to be creative and critical thinkers, but we opt out when given the opportunity to teach those skills. I have seen numerous discussion boards where the teacher does not structure conversation that requires back-and-forth dialog among students. Feedback from the teacher is often lacking. In many classes, most students do not even participate, acting as “lurkers” who may or may not even be reading the postings. A common teacher response to lurking is to require a specified number of postings, which of course can easily degenerate into a game where students just go through the motions of conversing. The problems of engaging students in on-line discussion prompted me to specify devices that teachers can use to get students more involved in on-line discussion (Klemm, 1998a).

Shared-document Computer Conferencing − A Better Alternative

Shared-document computer conferencing (SDCC) overcomes the limitations of bulletin boards. The basic advantage arises from encouraging student groups to integrate and synthesize multiple ideas and commentary. Synthesis and summary are the hallmarks of effective discourse. Learners are obliged not only to speak but to listen and enrich their knowledge and thinking. The academic deliverables that emerge are communal.

What is the role of technology in collaborative learning? In the “old” days, students had to e-mail their written materials to every member of the learning group, who in turn had to e-mail their responses to everyone. This crude approach does not provide a convenient environment for creating or re-structuring material in the group’s assignment or for hyperlinking sets of shared documents or external digital resources. SDCC software enables a new and better way of sharing documents.

SDCC systems liberate students from the limited discourse available with bulletin board notes. Maintaining a working memory of the intellectual content is facilitated, because everything can be seen in one self-contained document. At worst, one only has to scroll up and down to see the various facts and ideas contained therein, which is far more convenient that having the same content put in separate e-mail messages that have to be opened and closed one at a time, obliging the reader to remember what information is in each posting.

Most importantly, responses to points made by others in the group can be done in context, in the form of pop-up notes, for example, that still let you see the original text of what is being responded to and the context in which comments are embedded.

SDCC software provides shared workspaces for the insertion and iterative organization of information and insights, leading to evolving intellectual products that are continuously available for editing and annotation - in that same workspace - by all peers and instructors. The value of such software has been reviewed by Sherry et al. (2000) and many predecessors.

Failure of SDCC Software in the Marketplace

In the last dozen or so years, multiple varieties of SDCC software have been born only to endure a short and troubled life. Jim Snell and I created one of early forms of SDCC with a product called “FORUM,” an innovation that won us in 1993 the First Prize in an international contest for the “Best New Idea in Distance Education.” Limitations of the early versions have been overcome in our latest Web-based version, Forum MATRIX (http://xshare.tamu.edu), now available free as open-source code. Our innovation was succeeded about four years later by a similar commercial product, “Groove,” developed by the IBM icon who created Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie. This product apparently failed in the market place, despite having much more financial backing and a much more sophisticated marketing program. About the same time, other similar products came along, but they too have seen little success. Most of these have been designed for corporations and government, not education. A review of currently leading SDCC products has been published recently (PC Magazine, May 23, 2006, p. 23).

Next came Web-based “Wiki’s,” a large assortment of which are now available. Many of these are even hosted free. Wikis are generally used like blogs, but with an emphasis on participants annotating what is posted by others. Wiki’s often lack sophisticated management tools for user certification, access permissions (no access, read only, read and write), multiple independent workspaces, and seamless integration with a digital library.

Why did the SDCC concept fail to catch on? Many of the early systems were just too expensive for the education community. Examples of systems included Hummingbird, NextPage, E-room, and WebEx. WebEx, for example, cost $6,000 to set up and $100 per user per month. And some of these systems require extensive support infrastructure. But cost is not the explanation for lack of acceptance, because free systems, like Wikis, are available.

One problem with systems that are maintained on other people’s servers is that, as an Editor of PC Magazine put it, “there’s no way to know who’s behind the glossy interface, which unnamed third parties are involved, or how well your data is (sic) protected” (Mendelson, 2006). Microsoft has now plunged into the SDCC market with its “Microsoft Office Live,” and Microsoft’s marketing muscle may well push SDCC over the top, Mendelson reminds us that Microsoft has a very poor credentials when in comes to computer security. The important thing is that coincident with Microsoft’s foray into SDCC is the recent introduction of other similar products. Google has introduced Google Docs and Spreadsheets (docs.google.com). There is also ThinkFree (thinkfree.com), Zoho (zoho.com), and gOffice (gooffice.com). These products are free (or almost free), and they operate on the principle of storing files and software applications on an Internet server hosted by the SDCC company. These products are pitched to the business community (Albro, 2007), where the culture of collaboration is well established.

In education, collaboration has a bad reputation among many teachers for a variety of reasons. Some teachers think of collaborative learning as a form of cheating, apparently without realizing that the teacher can still hold individuals accountable by suitable apportionment ratios for individual versus group grades. Many teachers have had bad experiences with group learning when they were students, brought on by teachers who were ignorant of group-learning theory and best practices. There is also the explanation that educators, particularly college professors, are slow to change their ways. But not all professors are luddites. Finally, my own experience is that even many students object to group learning, in part because of bad experiences in other poorly managed courses.

We originally thought that Forum MATRIX and other SDCC products were not catching on among educators because the products were not packaged in a way where teachers could see the value. In the decade and more that followed, a whole host of SDCC products appeared in a variety of packaging, at least one of which should have had mass appeal, we thought. There has always been the problem that it was hard to find such products from Internet search engines, because they are called by different names: enterprise solutions, Web conferencing, meetingware, project ware, or peer-to-peer netware. Also, the names don’t mean the same thing to everyone.

At one time we thought that maybe the SDCC products were too hard to use. But the same people who could write formulas for Excel would not use SDCC. Any new software paradigm takes a few years to catch on, but by the time SDCC had a chance to get accepted, we were all hurled into the simple, point-and-click world of the Internet. Students were not obliged

to show much more initiative and creativity than browsing with point and clicking.

This brings us to what I now think is the heart of the problem. Students are not particularly attracted to do the hard work of research, logical analysis, synthesis of ideas and data, and creation of interactive discourse. Pointing and clicking is so much easier. When required by a teacher to do more than find stuff on the Internet, students would prefer to express opinions, rather than engage in a discourse that requires them to listen to what others have to say and integrate that with data and evidence to produce a creative synthesis. And what teacher wants to read and grade all this creative discourse? Professors, for example, barely have enough time to do their research and grade multiple-choice tests.

An added, and perhaps more fundamental problem, relates to what I said at the beginning about the growing individualism of our culture.

Redeeming Education

Via SDCC Technology

Educational leadership should come from our universities. Too often, universities are the problem, not the solution. Except for Colleges of Education, university faculty and administrators show relatively little involvement in K-12 and show more commitment to research and varsity sports as they do to educational practice in their own institutions. In their book on the need for reform of universities, William Willimon and Thomas Naylor (1995) assert that university faculties and administrators are insufficiently concerned about the learning experiences of their students. Willimon and Naylor ask, “Is the real purpose of college life to entertain students for four years before they enter the workforce?” Rather than promoting “shared values and common aims,” our campuses seem to be dominated by “narcissism and hedonism.” Eileen Brown is quoted as saying that “American institutions of higher learning today, are among the more conservative forces in our society, continuing to educate in a hierarchical, individualistic, and passive manner out of tune with our society’s growing need to create learning communities in every area of business, government, and social services.”

So, my point is that universities not only have an obligated to enrich the sense of communal learning, they also now have, through SDCC technology, the means to facilitate such learning. Thankfully, my university now has a heightened awareness of the value of written discourse and is creating an array of “W courses” that require intensive writing experiences. And of course, our Forum MATRIX is available, not only in stand-alone form, but also as a tool in the university-wide WebCT. Collaborative writing is the best kind of writing for students because the emphasis not just on writing as such but on communication.

Making SDCC Acceptable

as a Medium for Instruction

Teachers may need reminding that our intellectual culture deteriorates as we shift education away from dialog to monolog, from group-based reasoned analysis to the individual soapbox. Many teachers deceive themselves into thinking they have solved the problem by using “discussion boards” that are routinely available in typical course management operating systems, such as WebCT.

In a modern SDCC environment, students not only can view scrollable documents in their Web browser, but most importantly, they can check a document out for inserting text and graphics, editing, or for making links (to Web sites, other documents in the same SDCC, or to pop-up notes). Documents are saved in word processor or html format. In Forum MATRIX, the documents are not only archived on our own Web server, always available to all authorized participants, but they can be saved to a local PC.

Our open-source Forum MATRIX system (http://xshare.tamu.edu), for example, features an unusually simple and clean interface that runs inside a Web browser. A user (student) logs into a local server and is given a menu of work spaces (“conferences”) in which the user is registered. Clicking on the desired conference opens a menu of the folders therein, which are the topics that are in the “conference” (Fig. 3a, left panel). In this case, the topics are the workspaces of various students. Also shown is a link for accessing the digital library that houses the references and background material for the conference. When the link to a topic is clicked, the tree expands and the right-hand panel displays the documents that are filed therein. When one of these is selected, it can be checked out (or deleted). Clicking on a document title downloads it and opens it in the appropriate software application. Any type of document or sub-document can be put in the workspace (Fig. 3B), and can be worked on by any authorized group member as long as the member has the software application on their local PC.

Multiple items from different students can be put into the same document. Students and teacher can scroll quickly through documents, recognizing quickly which inserts and pop-ups have special importance because of the context in which they occur. Unlike postings on discussion boards, the inserts can be seen in context - without any opening and closing of files. Pop-up notes, also in-context, open and close quicker than e-mail because they are stored as an integral part of the document, which has already been opened in RAM.

The real power of SDCC systems is that documents can be fully shared. Student teams can work together on the same copy of a document, adding inserts, deleting, making strikeouts, and inserting links. Such work may be a case study, a literature report, plans or results of a project, or other kind of document deliverable. The group can select an “editor” to convert the marked up copy into a new version, which can be pasted in as a “new article.” They can likewise create successive versions as the project evolves.

Conclusions

Message-based on-line discourse can overwhelm teachers with more e-mail than they or the students have time or inclination to read. The solution is to structure discussions in ways that shift the burden of communication from to teacher to the students. That is, require the discussion to be contained within learning teams and to be focused on accomplishing an assigned task. Thus, the bulk of the information and commentary does not require teacher involvement, and when it does, the teacher can communicate with the group as a whole rather than with separate mail to each learner.

The important teaching issue is that this kind of asynchronous discourse can be used to collect e-mail messages or it can be extended to support the creation of collaborative group products. To me, it makes more sense to use software that will allow a teacher to capitalize on the advantages afforded by collaborative learning formalisms.

The typical threaded-topic discussion board in on-line learning wastes an opportunity for more complete constructivist collaboration. This lost opportunity occurs for two main reasons: 1) teachers have not thought enough about how to enhance on-line learning; and 2) discussion-board software typically does not allow document sharing and in-context annotation, both of which are needed to optimize written discourse.

On-line discourse is optimized when the following conditions are met:

· The discourse has a clear objective that requires some kind of group-written deliverable.

· Students are required to go beyond the mere expression of opinion (for example: identify, compare and contrast, explain, argue, and decide).

· Students work in teams, using collaborative learning formalisms, to help each other to produce an academic deliverable.

References

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