Even though some students prefer "live" interaction, the good news is that in my modest sample of distance learning freshman writing courses the correspondence course model was rare. For most of these teachers, the discussion and collaboration they valued in their conventional courses was carried over to the distance learning course. And if discussion was lacking in the online course, it was often just because teachers did not yet know how to use the technology to its full potential. Yes, there are certain drawbacks that seem inherent in an online class, just as there are certain drawbacks that seem inherent in a conventional class. I am not a cheerleader for distance learning, and my goal is not to persuade you to jump on the distance learning bandwagon. But I do hope to persuade you that the online writing class, even as it exists now in this infant stage of computer technology, is not a lonely, impersonal place. In fact, if the technology is used well, the cyberclassroom can be a place of thoughtful and continuos discussion, in "real time" chat rooms and MOOs and on asynchronous communication tools such as bulletin boards and listservs. The student-centered writing classroom can remain alive and well in cyberspace, as long as we insist, as the teachers I interviewed insisted, that the tools of technology are used for discussion and collaboration. This might mean electronic peer response workshoping in a chat room, discussing class readings on a bulletin board, sharing topics on a listserve, writing collaborative hypertext essays on the Internet, having students explore links from a class website, or holding poetry readings in a MOO.  If we use the technology in the ways these teachers suggest, we can insure that the online class is not a correspondence course, but a constructivist course.
 
 

 

Currents in Electronic Literacy Fall 1999 (2), <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall99/melzer/>