This is going to sound really stupid: I have a problem with the way the terms "asynchronous" and "synchronous" are used in reference to online learning and course development. Almost universally in the instructional design literature, we see "asynchronous" used to refer to listservs, email, and other push-pull communication technologies. Synchronous is in turn used to refer to communication technologies such as chat, MUDs, MOOs, etc.
Here is where I get confused. From an information technology perspective, synchronous communication resembles something closer to video conferencing or telephony than it does text-based author/submit/read/author/respond technologies. To keep things straight in my own head (because this does come up quite a bit in meetings with course designers and faculty), I've resolved to accept that synchronous communication, in the context of online learning, refers to any direct communication in which all parties are present at the same time.
A pretty silly thing to get hung up on. Yes. But it's the silly stuff that can make you sound really stupid.
2 comments:
Welcome back, Mike. Glad to see you are blogging again.
I think it's a distinction worth making. The synchronous/asynchronous groupings are fairly crude, right? I mean that they are adequate for a highly general distinction, but what you're talking about is more a matter of degree. Near-simultaneous chat is asynchronous if we narrow it to a more precise degree. Sounds like we need a more nuanced vocabulary for the chronos of communication, technical and otherwise.
Thanks for noticing D. You're right of course... it comes down to the nomenclature. I think I may simply have been through too many LMS/CMS/KMS demos to have any real sense of how to use either term correctly in certain contexts. The bane of a word geek.
Post a Comment