Synchronous communications add to the richness of community interaction, it provides the "We are here now" interface.

In Notschool we provides areas for asynchronous social interaction as well as always open synchronous chat rooms. We find again a mix of online personalities from those who dominantly socialise to those who like to get on and work with out getting too much involved in the social scene, it is a sliding scale and some will be involved in a lot of chat for a few days and then they go quiet and a week later they are back with loads of work to show. Some manage to chat and work simultaneously.

I have been in dialogue with researchers who are in four chat rooms, contributing to a conference and sending me work via email all apparently at the same time. Even in the social areas a lot of quality dialog takes place; one 30 min chat with five researchers and two adults present generated 4370 words (146 wpm), covered Shakespeare, Harry Potter, various videos, CD tracks/bands, pizza recipes, what went wrong last night, what we are doing tonight, skateboarding versus online skating, the cartoons community, train journeys with young children, jobs and death. For some the social chat is the glue that holds the community together, others rarely go into the social areas but still feel part of a community.

A moderation system must be in place and administrators should be able to remove participants from the system or reduce their contribution privileges should they behave inappropriately.

Young people, especially teenagers, play with and change social language, words like cool and wicked have stayed current for many years but others like groovy and fat, were [popular for a while and faded away, SAFE has emerged recently ..there are many more. Some adults adopt them naturally into their dialog others just sound like they are trying to be teenagers...you will soon find out which you are! As a general guideing if you would say "That's cool" naturally in a face to face situation then you will prob sound OK saying it online.

Notes to expand on

Communities often contain many sub communities; in a village just about everyone will know or at least recognise most of the other residents but social interaction tends to be structured into overlapping and interlocking networks of friends. I recognise most residents in two villages near my house, I interact socialy with a minute percentage, I talk occasionally to perhaps 1 percent but I feel part of both communities.
We have a population of very diverse learners many of whom share some common characteristics – a focused interest in a narrow area of learing, low self esteem, high self esteem, some like to play fight online, some like to chat about work, some don’t want to chat. It is likely that they will form overlapping networks of friendship – natural sub communities.

I had a rather long session in the chat room yesterday – saved it and did a word count, took away all the names that start each line and there were 8300 words left. About 250 were mine and virtually all the rest were from 7 researchers. That was about one and a half hours and they are in there chatting endless hours day after day. They made less keyboard errors than me and type faster and were also chating on Yahoo at the same time. I wonder how much they used to write in school in the same time period.
There was a fair amount of what could seem like abusive contributions but the bulk of them were the same sort of dialogue you can hear in any playground when a bunch of friends get together and take the Mickey out of each other. Abuse and laughter separated by a few lines and, if you can see past the less palatable language, it was hilariously funny at times – I really was almost ROTFL and I felt accepted; I was (eventually) awarded the label of being cool….Phew!
Where were the learning gains in the traditional sense?
These were all initiated by researchers –
We helped xxxxxxx find and use radio software.
We talked about xxxxxx’s story – 97 pages, her style, where she draws her inspiration from, her character construction, the psychology of her characters, her ambition to publish and to write more. The other resarhcers were very supportive of her. – “it is cool,”…… ””I wish I could write like you”
We talked about periods, bad moods/pmt, is being a boy better than being a girl?
We talked to xxxxxxxxx about his drawings and helped him think of new things to draw – pizza, angels, fallen angels, fallen pizza, and more importantly developing his own cartoon characters and story again lots of peer support
Hey we talked about religion albeit briefly – and no swearing while on the topic – WOW
We shared and commented on song lyrics
Quotes from Shakespeare were exchanged – Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night.
Wew talkedto xxxx about computer games community – “xxxxx aint he the old computer games bloke ……… update it update it ! ……….plzzzzzzzzzzzzzz whit a cherry on top!”
We laughed a lot