Romiszowski, A. (1990). Computer-mediated communication and hypertext: the instructional use of two converging technologies. Interactive Learning International, 6, 5-29.
Subject: CMC; Education.
Romiszowski finds that "e-mail discussions are often much deeper, much richer and involve a larger proportion of the student group than is typical in a conventional class-based discussion". However he notes that there are certain difficulties as well, which e-mail discussions create for the instructor. Among these difficulties are "keeping control over the direction of the discussion and helping participants to maintain an overall view of the structure" of discussions as they unfold. He feels that the integration of hypertext and e-mail can help to overcome these difficulties.
Among the advantages of CMC which Romiszowski cites are: a democratic environment; a written record of class discussions; convenience of asynchronous conferencing. The disadvantages include: procrastination; lurking; multitude of different discussion threads in one conference; non-linearity of the discussion (people responding to different parts of the discussion at different times), along with the tremendous quantity of reading and re-reading which this entails in order for students to keep up with who is responding to what; and keeping the group on task.
In order to help instructors better structure their courses, Romiszowski defines three main functions of the instructor in a learner-centered envoironment: creating a non-threatening environment; facilitating group interaction; and providing group maintenance. For each of the three functions, Romiszowski proposes the following strategies:
1) Creating a non-threatening environment
--leave a personal welcome message for each student.
--reinforce early attempts of participation.
--reference student responses in your comments.
--send students individual . . . feedback . . .
--model expected behaviour concentrating on content and thought-provoking ideas.
2) Facilitating group interaction
--Keep the main discussion on track by providing leading questions.
--If the discussion starts getting off track, refocus.
--If a distracting topic appears that is generating interest, create a branch so that
the competing conversation is separate and optional.
--Focus efforts by suggesting that students look deeper into topics when
applicable.
--Provide summaries of what has been transpiring by drawing together main
themes.
3) Group maintenance "includes such duties as mediating differences that become obstructive, and making comments pertaining to the group's progress".
Particularly problematic in Romiszowski's observations of actual class interaction was the issue of keeping the discussion on track, keeping all participants involved, and organizing the temporally diverse threads of discussion organized. As part of the strategy for keeping the discussion on track and maintaining participation, Romiszowski re-structured his seminar so that "interaction on the CMC system was made part of the expected course activity, and was given some weighting in the course grading system". Discussion was kept on track by having students "focus the discussion of their [own] papers to a very precise degree . . . and by building in stimulus . . . questions for their colleagues . . ." The result of this strategy however exacerbated the third problem, that of organizing the tremendous amount of information involved in the discussion, since the new structure of the course basically resulted in all students writing mini
papers as contributions to the discussion.
The organization of this tremendous amount of information is where Hypertext proves useful. Romiszowski gives the example of a "paper-based-hypertext seminar" in which a paper was put on-line along with cross-referenced sources used to write the paper, which kept all of the discussion-generated information much better organized than it had been in his previous experiences.
