Exploring the affordances of online chat for learning

Byline: Chee-Kit Looi Text-based interaction is one of the frequently used modes of computer mediated communication connecting users via computer networks. Text chat has been and is still an important technology component of online distributed learning environments where students communicate synchronously amongst themselves and with other learning partners such as teachers and experts. Text chat provides several affordances that make it an effective medium for useful online interactions, despite its limitations and the advent of newer technologies like avatar or graphic chat, audio and video conferencing. In this paper, we explore the properties of online text chat, and discuss the limitations and problems of conversations supported by the chat medium. We discuss ways of making the conversations better, enabling more natural and coherent conversations, facilitating conversations with a learning nature, providing aggregate views of chat conversations, and providing chat participants with a social sense of the context or the dynamics of the conversation flow. We review work on technological innovations that support, analyse, and visualise chat conversations.