https://convore.com/
The basics
Convore is clever. It builds on several years of common online chatting behaviour, and now, as it says, offers “a quick way to instant message with groups of friends in real-time. You can join in on conversations about topics that interest you, or start your own conversations. Don’t worry about missing anything, because we keep track of what you’re not seeing, so that when you return, you can easily catch up!”
Convore has a couple of attractive features: it has the ability for ‘real time’ conversations to be distributed in time — people who join late, or catch up after the chat is finished can still see what was said (rather like Google Wave, which ended up being more hype than hope – as Craig Ritchie discusses). Also, there’s a modicum of ‘rating’ – you can ‘star’ good comments and contributions.
What needs to be explored
Like all Web 2.0 technologies, Convore has the usual controls to create groups, network people together, manage logins and identities. Most of all, it just looks fresher and more natural and inviting than many traditional online educational communications tools. However, we would need to explore whether the environment was sufficiently ‘closed’ to permit good conversations to occur without distractions. As Long and Ellery have shown in earlier times online, students can often need a dedicated communciations channel to ensure they don’t also engage in, or try to use it, in ways that are not appropraite for study.
It looks, superficially, as if signing in and managing identity is very easy – facebook or twitter can be used. Perhaps another key point of exploration is whether students, now, should be encouraged to have twitter accounts specifically for study. If so, they would need support to obtain them, where that support also emphasised what the account was for – a kind of safe, study-specific identity management.
Showing how to create groups - note the public / private option
Pedagogic Challenge
A challenge: while online communications involving realtime chat (including now audio and video) have been seen by some as an opportunity to ‘recreate’ the classroom experience at distance, the reality is that managing the input of large numbers of students simultaneously is very hard. The online chat medium does not, in fact, make for the same experience as a group discussion in a room. It’s different. Moreover, most of the time, students studying at online are doing so not because of spatial limitations or distance so much as time problems – therefore, whether the chat is online or in class, it is very hard to schedule everyone’s attendance.
Convore allows chats to be used ‘after the fact’ – but a teacher must make a positive benefit of this fact. Perhaps the way to use this tool is to have a real time conversation that is more distributed in time, running over several weeks with many participants – even as many as 100s of students in large units – using the conversation as a kind of reflective interaction to be consumed and explored at leisure. However, would students have the digital literacies to know how to do this successfully?
Alternatives
While not strictly an alternative, Buddyspace, http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/buddyspace/, is a great development from the Open University which provides a much richer graphic environment to assist effective chatting using several other clients. Yackpack, http://www.yackpack.com/ would also offer some advantages, as well as the standard forms of chat such as Tinychat, http://tinychat.com. However Convore is interesting because it falls somewhere between a quick and dirty ‘web chat room’ and the more general public (and now largely unusable) chat engines such as MSN, Yahoo and so on.
