Professorial Reflections: informal discussions and reflections

We open our issue with ‘Professorial Reflections’ – an informal, but nonetheless productive discussion about researching spirituality in dance and performance studies. We aim to offer this type of discussion, between different leading professors in dance and performance studies, in subsequent issues of DMAS. Our intention here is to open dialogue about spirituality in these fields, through informal discussion and academic chit-chat, with the aim of supporting new areas of research through conversation and reflecting

Vicarious learning through capturing task‐directed discussions

The vicarious learner group has been developing a multimedia database system to promote and enhance the role of dialogue in learning. A specific interest, and the origin of the projects' collective name, is in the question of whether and how dialogue can be helpfully ‘reused’. What benefits can students gain from dialogue as observers, not just as participants? We describe our initial attempts to generate and capture educationally effective discourse exchanges amongst and between students and tutors. Problems encountered with available CMC discourse formats led to our development of a set of Task Directed Discussions (TDDs). A medium‐sized corpus of discourse exchanges was collected using the TDDs. A selection of nearly two hundred of these TDD exchanges formed the multimedia discourse database to the implemented prototype system, Dissemination. Initial results from a controlled experiment and evaluation of Dissemination are outline

Exploring usability discussions in open source development

The public nature of discussion in open source projects provides a valuable resource for understanding the mechanisms of open source software development. In this paper we explore how open source projects address issues of usability. We examine bug reports of several projects to characterise how developers address and resolve issues concerning user interfaces and interaction design. We discuss how bug reporting and discussion systems can be improved to better support bug reporters and open source developers

What influences student participation in asynchronous online discussions

Asynchronous online discussions are widely used in online and blended learning courses. Participation by adult learners can be encouraged by the contributions of teachers, and when online groups are given well-structured tasks that are assessed. The introduction of such discussions to a pre-existing short course in mentorship for qualified health care professionals offered an opportunity to compare participation by different groups studying concurrently. This was done by counting numbers of student contributions to twenty-four different online groups, regardless of length or content. This showed that the contribution of teachers was not an important factor in influencing student participation, though individual students who contributed prolifically tended to encourage their fellow group members to contribute more. These results may not be generalizable: the course was short, the discussions focused on a well-structured and assessed task, and the learners were mature

Navigating Conversational Turns: Grounding Difficult Discussions on Racism

Antiracism is not only worth our time and attention, but also a process of internal and external transformation—of looking critically within the writing center at the same time as looking outward to campus and community. Critical reflection often begins during staff meetings, colloquia, and conferences; however, there can be setbacks in these dialogues. What we have observed in professional development with predominantly white writing center members is that conversations that start out as explicitly about racism often turn into conversations focused on language differences. This pattern of evasion worries us, as it detracts from efforts to identify and work against systematic racism and leads to suggestions for changing individual writers, rather than institutions. By focusing on language differences, and by implication language change, we push aside analysis of systems and instead put the onus on individual students who are often most disadvantaged by those systems. To address this troublesome conversational turn, we first describe the pattern and then propose strategies for grounding conversations, strategies we have identified in the literature on teaching and organizing for social change