Chats and Shared Understanding: How Instructors Can Help Learners Use Academic Chat Rooms

Online learning discussion formats provide an opportunity for learners to share their experiences, negotiate meaning, and take ownership of the subject matter. Chat rooms also provide learners with anyplace and real-time ways to participate in academic discussions. Shared understanding occurs when individual experience mediated through group discourse becomes collective thought that emerges from the exploration and analysis of personal experience, text material, and the construction of ideas from critical group dialogue. Shared understanding is the blending of private thought with public dialogue. Increasing the understanding of how shared meaning develops through computer-mediated, real-time communication may help instructors design and facilitate discussions that lead to higher-order thinking in online inquiry-based environments. In this article the authors will first discuss the framework for using academic text-based chats in their course. A second section will describe the process the learners use to create shared meaning. In the concluding section, they will present recommendations for practice, an outcome of lessons learned from their experience in designing academic chat spaces.