Backchannel+Chat+for+Feb+23+class

A backchannel chat is a secondary conversation that is happening while the primary conversation is also going on. It is a way for participants to communicate with each other without stopping the class to ask a question or to make a comment out loud.

According to wikipedia, it is: **Backchannel** is the practice of using networked [|computers] to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside live spoken remarks. The term was coined in the field of Linguistics to describe listeners' behaviours during verbal communication, [|Victor Yngve] 1970.

The term "backchannel" generally refers to online conversation about the topic or the speaker. Occasionally backchannel provides audience members a chance to [|fact-check] the presentation. First growing in popularity at technology conferences, backchannel is increasingly a factor in education where [|WiFi] connections and [|laptop] computers allow students to use ordinary chat like [|IRC] or [|AIM] to actively communicate during class. More recently, researchers from Penn State University have explored bringing "backchannel" up front in classrooms using what they call "[|ClassCommons]," to increase students' participation in large size classes. Twitter is also widely used today by audiences to create backchannels at technology conferences. When audience members add an event hashtag to their tweets (for example, #w2e was the hashtag used for the Web 2.0 Expo New York in 2009), anyone can run a Twitter search to review all the backchannel tweets related to that event.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel

 There are several different backchannel sites. Two free sources are titanpad (formerly ether pad) and chatterous. For our purposes today we will use a GoogleDoc. Information for accessing this site is below.

GoogleDoc (this is our backchannel)

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