only connect - progress - CMC

Which stands for Computer Mediated Communication in this case. The sub pages in this section attempt to divide this area into manageable chunks. In the first instance this was to have been the core of the dissertation as dictated by the title of the M.Ed, but things seem to have drifted a little as time has gone on and the emphasis is moving away from looking purely at the nature of that communication to what is communicated. By this I mean that I'm now seeing CMC issues as getting inexorably bound up with pedagogy, structure and organisation; how the very fact that CMC is the mode of exchange is affecting the kind of work I choose to deliver and how I am able to respond to that as a tutor.

			Available channels

Each student was given an AOL account which was used by some as their only link with the net, for others it was added to their existing link. Myself and the tutors also had AOL accounts to be used in the ways we saw fit, but mostly to give us access to the same one-to-one and group chat that the students had. So, we had: E-mail This was both public and private. Private e-mail was simply one-to-one messaging between any two members of the Only Connect project. Students we able to change the AOL passwords they were given so they had complete control over what was seen of their communications. Two mailing lists were created. The Learn At Home list had as its members all students, tutors and me; the Only Connect list consisted of myself, the tutors, Liz McQueen (who was unable to access it), and Karim Derrick from TAG as he was interested and there was no objection - this just meant that we needed to not mention specific students in that list but it gave us good access to technical help with TagLink. These lists meant that there could be open discussion amongst the learning community and amongst the technical community but that the two could be kept separate. E-mail was used as the main method of sending and receiving tasks, sometimes as attachments, sometimes as plain mailings. Synchronous Channels AOL is a rich resource for these. Buddy Lists were set up so that it was possible to see immediately who else from the project was on line. From that list it was possible to directly message those on line via AOL's Instant Messages. It was also a very simple process to start a private chat room and invite others into it. this system was seen as preferable to the TagLink live chat system a) because it was integrated into the AOL interface and b) because it was a simple matter to save the contents of the chat as a text file. Asynchronous Channels Apart from e-mail we had hoped to explore asynchronous conferencing. There was a bulletin board system in TagLink but there were some things about it that we didn't like (which have since been fixed) and, aside from that, we never really got to the stage were we felt it was of use in the context of the activities we did, though see details elsewhere of it's use to share information. From a technical point of view, what I really wanted here was a Usenet group. This would have been ideal as we could have used it off-line with the AOL news reader or any similar application. unfortunately I never managed to find out how to set up such a system without putting it in the public domain. This should be a fairly simple operation and it would be a good starting point for future projects wishing to exploit the advantages of such conferencing without using expensive systems like First Class et al.