{"id":3523,"date":"2021-02-20T18:43:57","date_gmt":"2021-02-20T23:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/?p=3523"},"modified":"2026-03-19T08:14:28","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T12:14:28","slug":"chatalyst-zoom-chat-as-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/2021\/02\/20\/chatalyst-zoom-chat-as-form\/","title":{"rendered":"Chatalist: Zoom Chat as Form"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
\r\n\t
\r\n\t\t
\r\n\t\t\t
\r\n\t\t\t\t\n

Chatalist: Zoom Chat as Form<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>A latecomer to pandemic pedagogy, I’m lately drawn to the phenomenon of Zoom Chat–something else that happens while I’m teaching. I first found it distracting and disconcerting, especially when I tried to follow Chat while talking and listening to students talking. I soon gave up on that impossible task and just let Chat happen. I would download and read the Chat after class, viewing it as a supplement<\/em>\u00a0to what happened while I pointed things out and led class discussion. Or were the talking Zoom squares and Chat more akin to a movie<\/em> with subtitles<\/em>? Are Chat comments a hyper form of captioning<\/em> or annotation<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

I learned that students are doing all kinds of things in these Chats: commenting on texts\"\"<\/a> we were discussing, fancrushing and hating on literary characters, sharing family stories that relate to class readings\/viewings, making connections to texts they studied in other classes, recommending films and TV series, validating one another’s comments. I\u00a0ask for volunteers to serve as Chat Curator so they can pull relevant comments into our audio discussions, momentarily aligning the channels. Here Zoom Chat becomes a form of digital\u00a0polyphony<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>I begin to think of Chat as an\u00a0augmentation <\/em>or extension\u00a0<\/em>of each class session, something beyond a cyber call-and-response<\/em>. At one level, it can be a multimodal<\/em> form of class participation (some students talk in the squares and<\/em> text in the Chat, others prefer one or the other). At another level, Chat constitutes a multilmodal form of collaboration.\u00a0<\/em>At still another, Zoom Chat functions as a pop-up<\/em> reading group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Student discourse shifts registers in Chat. It becomes more confessional. It becomes slangier, zestier, punchier. Is Chat a collaborative form of\u00a0subversion<\/em>? If Chat operates as a\u00a0subterranean <\/em>stream, does that make it a punk practice within Zoom teaching? As I save each Chat and file it on my laptop, what kind of archive am I making? And how will records of this emergent form remake our future teaching?\u00a0 – MB<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

\n
\"cross-section<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n

Image Sources:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Music Theory Academy<\/a>
\nMultimodality for Diverse Audiences<\/a>
\nKarst Hydrology<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\r\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"featured_post":"off","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[213,211,212],"class_list":["post-3523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-multimodality-zoom-teaching","tag-pandemic-pedagogy","tag-zoom-chat"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3523"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4217,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523\/revisions\/4217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}