Conversations: Computer Mediated Dialogue, Multilogue, and Learning. (1996).

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        BALDWIN, BETH W., Ph.D. Conversations: Computer Mediated Dialogue, Multilogue, and 
        Learning. (1996). Directed by Dr. Hephzibah Roskelly. 232pp.
      
      
         
      
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        The purpose of this [text] is to argue in favor of a "pedagogy of textual conversation," a 
        pedagogy made possible in large part by electronic technology, by computer mediated 
        communication. Informing the argument is a deep philosophical commitment to conversation 
        itself as the primary mode of meaning-making in both social and personal life. Material 
        presented in support of the main argument is drawn from current and past pedagogical and 
        communications theory as well as from ethnographic research conducted in the fall semester 
        of 1994 in which students in an English composition class were linked to students in an 
        education class via a single VAX electronic conference. Actual experiences in the 
        electronic medium are forwarded to suggest that those who engage in extensive textual 
        conversation with one another benefit from improved rhetorical skills, understanding of 
        course content, the ability to make connections between ideas, and a liberalization of 
        ideological views. 
      
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        But this [book] is not meant only to argue this issue in a classical or academically 
        authorized sense, i.e., as a monological exercise of logic and reason with its inevitable 
        linear development and closure. It is meant also to enact a conversational model. Thus it 
        is a hybrid form of writing, a fugue-like composition which, like its musical counterpart 
        is a polyphonic (multi-vocal) composition based upon several related, but different themes 
        enunciated by several voices or parts in turn, subjected to contrapuntal treatment, and 
        which gradually builds up into a complex form having distinct divisions or stages marked 
        at the end by an open-ended climax rather than a conclusion. In other words, the work as a 
        whole is in great part the subject of itself. 
      
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