The Zoom chat, are you a fan? How to recreate it in a classroom?

As a participant there are few things that I love more than a well-moderated and active chat that can complement a lecture or meeting. It’s an outlet that keeps my mind running during the meeting and turns me from a passive listener into an active contributor. I get much more out of an hour of zoom if the chat is active. Mind you, it’s really hard for a presenter to activate and moderate a good chat. It’s a skill that can be learned, though, as is clearly demonstrated by thousands of Twitch streamers every day. Anyway, this article (quotes below) is an excellent analysis of this phenomenon in a virtual classroom setting. Reading it I had two « product manager » questions: 1) can we help profs get better at responding to a chat while they run a lecture? 2) can we move some of that participatory energy to the offline setting? « There was one element of being online for the last few years that I missed, a lot: the chat. The art of speaking aloud while keeping up with the flow of a chat is not a literacy many had practice with before the pandemic. Chat is about presence. The ephemeral “you had to be there” shared experience of a good chat builds visibility and ties among the people present in it. Online, I heard from probably 90 per cent of my students voluntarily in the chat. No matter how welcoming I try to make my in-person classrooms, verbal contributions have never come close to that number. Chat allows students to be their own active Greek chorus in spaces where they might otherwise be passive. The in-person classroom has its strengths, but no monopoly on connection or communication. https://universityaffairs.ca/career-advice/the-digital-classroom/the-online-meeting-chat-is-dead-long-live-the-online-meeting-chat Sent #viawaverly