Written voice

Feenberg raised the problems about the move from spoken to written when you use e-learning and that you lose the non-verbal aspects of a discussion. In some ways this can be dealt with by the written style you adopt. Reading the Skype transcripts they are very informal and there is not a real focus on the discussion topic in a rigorous way. They are conversational. They are very like the sort of chats you used to get in Yahoo rooms and Groups when they existed. You have to get used to multi-threaded conversations and everyone talking at once but after a while it becomes natural.

Rowntree talks about people chaging their language for online learning and becoming much more conversational and how it can take a while to adapt from academic language. This is something from the debate. The proposals and oppositions are written like you would for a research paper - with evidence and references. In a spoken discussion you would not be as exact, it would have a completely different feel to it. It would be much less logical and much more rhetorical.