Berkman@10: IRC and the Dialogue of Education

I will say it: Berkman@10 is offering too many social tools for its audience. Twitter. IRC. A democratic question display. And then there’s Flickr, Second Life, and the live webcasts. At one point, I was watching a streaming live video from someone’s cell phone (and was surprised at the quality to boot). I honestly felt too connected throughout much of the day.

While I took notes, though, I posted a couple of tweets, and then mostly hung out in the IRC channel. I’ve only used IRC a couple times before Berkman, so I had all the tools necessary to automatically jump into the channel and start chatting with everyone present in the virtual environment. But, seriously, and I [mis]quote Tim Hwang (with whom I shared a “Food for Thought” dinner): there were some haters in there. Harsh criticism from those who decided to speak their mind (I’m especially looking at you, Dave Winer).

Besides the negative critique from the IRC audience members, I actually used IRC a lot, beyond mere chatter. Kudos to everyone in the channel for actually paying attention to the speakers, because I used you guys as an educational tool. Some people in the chatroom seemed a bit out of the loop, so others would explain concepts or post links to biographies of the speakers and even those who stood up to ask questions. IRC provided an excellent source of information, and a quick one at that. I lost the discussion a few times in my attempts to multitask, and IRC got me back on track, but the best implementation of IRC turned out to be the opportunity to gain more information about what was being said. Hypertext proves useful, once again.

Considering its practicality today, I want to introduce the IRC medium to a class at school sometime. It’d be a good experiment in networking during a seminar discussion, but it would also prove that students can collaborate to further educate each other, or also to stay ahead of the dialogue in the direct teacher-pupil relationship. I might easily predict that more “hating” would occur in a classroom setting: students complaining that they’re bored, pointing out that the teacher is wrong, declaring that they found a video on YouTube of a cat flushing a toilet. Ultimately, though, IRC would create a hyperdiscussion, one that exceeded the hierarchy of the teacher-student partnership, a grassroots educational system of sorts. I know that if my Sociology of Education (SO444.A1) class had established an IRC node during our weekly seminars, we easily could have used it to find relevant information online, particularly at the beginning of the class when my professor would ask us if we had found anything of relevance in the news at the time. Well, IRC: log on, talk to my classmates, share links with one another. Hypertext moves beyond unilinear writing constricted to paper. IRC moves beyond the linear narrative discussion. In fact, if you want to be savvy, you could even call it metaconversation. But an IRC channel in a classroom, in a lecture, in a seminar could do wonders (though I don’t obscure the potential for chaos) for education in a university setting.