Chat Rooms

In class earlier this week, we were all in different rooms. We met in a chat room online at 9:05 am, had technical difficulties, and ended up leaving at different times. Online chat rooms can be very useful when an instructor is out of town or trapped in his/her house after a snowstorm. But there is also always the possibility of the server that is being used crashing, or confusion on the chat members’ parts. There is something very impersonal about not being able to see everyone’s faces, or to know who is talking if one doesn’t know everyone’s names already. There is always that possibility of opening a new window and continuing on some other subject and forgetting all about the chat space.
Chat rooms are useful when one needs to interactively communicate with a large group of people. We had class online this week because our instructor was out of town, and were able to ask questions about assignments and go over key points for projects and papers due in the near future. Students who are normally shy and have social anxiety in class were able to ‘speak’ and ask the questions that they wanted in the chat room without a lot of the fear that one has in an actual classroom. Students could be comfortable in their pajamas but still share the same virtual space as 20+ other people. Students could lay in bed, eating chips if they wanted to but still be “in class”. A new level of comfort, physically and mentally, is achieved with online classrooms.
Where one gains one comfort, he/she loses another. Online chat rooms, at least the ones on T-square, can be very confusing and often break down. Chat rooms can easily get out of hand when there is a plethora of people trying to talk at once. There are also sub-chat rooms that not many people know how to access, and many instructions get lost in translation along the way. There is a delay when sending out information, and one does no have the immediate clarity in virtual spaces than in physical space. Unexpected errors may occur and students may not even get to ask their instructor a question before the whole system shuts down from an overload.
In physical space, students and teachers may forget what their peers say very quickly, but in virtual chat rooms, whatever one says can be read over and analyzed multiple times, so one must really take care with what they say. There are policies against flaming someone else, but that does not stop many students. So even though there is no physical interaction, chat rooms can still cause social anxiety in different ways.
The virtual world also offers an infinite amount of spaces that one can choose from. If one gets in the least bit bored with the chat room, he/she can go off and open another window and get lost in the virtual world for minutes to hours to days. If it’s the latter, then he/she definitely missed class. There is something about the physical classroom that is official, keeps student’s attention for a longer period of time, and is more personal than the virtual classroom space.