The many ways in which students converse about their inner mental activities involved in studying now become, themselves, a network: bulletin board postings, chats to a fellow student after class (whether online or in person), discussions of other students’ public work and more all link together because they occur increasingly via the Internet or with reference to it. These learning conversations are an essential complement to the activities and tasks which students perform
Conversation is an integral part of the knowledge networking paradigm because the environment of the contemporary Internet constantly blurs the lines between traditional ‘information’ (published, received, recirculated) without any discussion and the traditional ‘communication’ about such information. The tools which are described in this site, in most cases, permit these two activities occur together to the point where you can’t tell the difference between them unless that difference is imposed post hoc. Learning conversations therefore are essential to education conducted within this paradigm. They create the human network (of learners, knowledge workers, and so on) which is part of the overall networking effect of people and computers: without conversations, there is no attachment of one (human) node to another.
Students’ learning conversations replace the awkward idea of ‘participation’ in a unit of study. These conversations span both formal and informal learning situations: indeed, the term conversation is designed to emphasise the persistence and interaction of what people say to each other in a variety of settings. Thus learning conversations are not just ‘postings’ to a discussion board (though they can be), but also include informal chats with tutors, any collaborative interchange in a classroom or chat session, the responses they make to online materials and so on. Effectively, there is a meta-conversation for a student, in their studies, which is made up of many fragments and threads.
It is possible to assess conversations, either to emphasise their importance, or to motivate students to do them. A portfolio is a particularly useful approach for this, so long as students understand that the goal is not to just ‘complete enough conversations’ to fill the portfolio but to engage in productive dialogue with themselves, reflecting on what they have said and heard.
An interesting perspective on learning conversations, not least because it relates so closely to informal learning in an online setting, is: Nardi, B. et al. 2007. Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft. HICSS ’07 Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
