This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
In this book, I explore this theme by looking at how one particular type of technology—namely, text-based chat—influences educational discussions. I will show how features of the technology reduce inhibition, and encourage more equitable power distributions in educational discussions. Then, I will show how these changes have a relatively minor impact on the content of these discussions. Finally, I will conclude by using these findings to develop some specific design suggestions about how certain elements of online environments can be manipulated to encourage the types of behavior that we want to see.