This article is a pragmatic look at asynchronous chat and its position in the online classroom. Black shares her own experiences teaching in the online classroom and advocates that “a text of talk” is created through asynchronous chats. She argues that this text of talk is or should be the location for critical thinking and understanding in the online classroom and that the instructor should structure it in terms of guidelines and assessment as the important component of online learning it is. She discusses her own guidelines for student participation in asynchronous forums. Black believes that discussions of asynchronous chat in the online classroom are few and far between.
In this article, Black is most concerned with the quality of responses in asynchronous discussion forums. What I find most interesting about this article is that it attempts to comment (directly and indirectly) on student motivation in the online classroom. There does not seem to be a great deal of research on this topic and not many people are writing on it. This topic represents an opportunity to contribute to a discussion related to problems and issues in the online classroom and will hopefully provide fodder for future research projects. I think Black makes a good point that teachers need to be thinking about what their requiring of their students in asynchronous chats, a major component of online learning, and how we can maximize the use of critical thinking skills in such a forum as we strive to do in the on-ground classroom. It would seem that Black believes that the reason that we should be using the basic characteristics of asynchronous chat—such as the fact that it allows students and extended amount of time to reflect on their responses—to facilitate such a lesson. I enjoy Black’s article and I appreciate that it contains applicable components I can take away and apply in my own classroom. My concern with this article is that it seems to essentialize the characteristics of good student writing and leaves little room for consideration of these characteristics along the lines of gender, race, or culture. Black mentions that “In particular, discussion among students on specific knowledge has the potential to motivate inquiry and to create a learning context in which collaborative meaning making occurs” (4-5). While this social-constructivist approach fits in well with my own pedagogy, I am concerned that Black is more concerned with students demonstrating critical thought according to Black’s own definition than students considering their individual experiences and the forces that have shaped these in light of the questions at hand. In a way, Black’s scale for grading student responses to asynchronous online discussions forums seems essentialist and current-traditional, a method that does not encourage or foster meaning-making through such discussion. Treading carefully here, it almost seems as if Black believes students are inherently lazy individuals who are not taking advantage of the time table they are given in asynchronous chat situations, and that teachers should do more to encourage them. As Kelly Kinney’s discussion of self-silencing in the online classroom discusses, there could be many alternate explanations for a lack of reflective student responses in an asynchronous forum than Black seems prepared to acknowledge. While I appreciate Black’s discussion of this topic (she is right: not much has been done on asynchronous discussion, a topic important to my discussion of community in the online classroom), the article has its deterministic moments, casting asynchronous chat as the perfect solution to facilitating critical thinking, while ignoring race, gender, and multiculturalism, a fact that is very problematic:
"In the traditional classroom, discussion is often dominated by the instructor or a few students. The nature of asynchronous discussion allows all voices to be heard because (a) students are usually required to respond and their participation can be easily documented and (b) those who may be intimidated by speaking in from of their peers or those who need more response time are more easily able to participate" (12).
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