Pedablogue has a good article on the way he used contrariness to get a classroom chat rolling. I wonder if I could build that in to the CC1 course?
And, I wonder, how much chat can I do? Does our equivalent of Blackboard support chats? It might be fun to actually do in class.
That reminds me of a class idea that I loved that came out of a secondary classroom about twenty-five years ago. The teacher mandated that they could write notes, in fact they must write notes, because no one could talk and they had to stay busy with class work. They had a whole set of bins with student names on them. The students had to walk across the room and put the notes in the bin; they couldn’t just take it to the student. And the other student had to get up and get their notes out.
It was an idea I found fascinating. And here we have chats that do the same thing. Okay, I wouldn’t want to do this every class period, but a class period in which we are supposed to have a discussion, this would be an interesting approach.