#Chitchat online chat free#

Perhaps a professor runs into a student who asks about that looming semester project, article review, or experiment. You may bond over discussing the results of the latest college football game, a new online yoga class you tried, a home improvement project, an article you just read, or a conference you recently attended. So, what are the potential functions of chit-chat in higher education? What could university community members be missing out on in this virtual environment?īonding, maintaining trust, and building collegiality Yet, in our work-from-home world we are missing out on our informal touch points with colleagues and students. Perhaps, rarely before have we thought about chit-chat functions in the academic environment.

#Chitchat online chat free#

How do we define chit-chat? Chit-chat, much like small talk, has been viewed as phatic communication, which is free and aimless to connect socially rather than deliver content (Methot et al. Oh, how we now long for chit-chat by the department coffee pot or following a staff meeting. Chit-chat seems to be an occurrence of the past, a not much thought about lost (p)art of our work-life culture: It has become nearly extinct. While these seemingly insignificant, occasional, and spontaneous hallway encounters may have taken up a relatively small part of our days, the chit-chat in higher education has suddenly vanished, become elusive, and is nowhere to be found in the back-to-back Zoom or Teams meetings. Do you remember having these interactions with colleagues and students on our campuses? You may not, as these chit-chats often occurred before the pandemic forced most of us to work from home. These moments of informality help a student develop their social presence-or the sense that they are a real person-which is especially important in distance education.Remember the “good ol’ days?” How often did you walk down a hallway of your academic unit and pass a student, faculty or staff member, or administrator and have a short conversation about the new course you were teaching, asked for advice about applying to graduate school, talked about the upcoming faculty-staff-student barbeque, or discussed a pending sporting event between rivals? We have all taken part in these chit-chats, whether distracting or welcoming.

I draw on my experience teaching 100% online courses and build on the literature about emotion and learning, feminist pedagogy, and online pedagogies to offer a framework for rethinking informal communication in an online learning environment and encourage educators to actively make space for it in their teaching. The form and structure of online interactions makes it difficult to curate informal communication that is productive and supports rather than obstructs learning. Teaching online requires us to think differently about communication and how it shapes a learning community.

Based on the premise that the social aspects of a class affect a learner’s participation, I argue that informal communication enables students to be thinking and feeling beings and thus is part of building a strong learning community. Scholars of teaching and learning recognize that interacting with ideas and acquiring skills involve both cognition and emotion.