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Analyzing Conversations in a Multi-Party Epistemic Game

April 25, 2011

Multi-party chat is a standard feature of popular online games. It’s increasingly available in collaborative learning environments, including epistemic games. A recent paper addresses the differences between spoken and typed conversations as high school students interacted with an epistemic game called Urban Science. Analyses showed that speech was associated with more global aspects of text (narrativity, cohesion) while typed input was associated with more local aspects (syntactic simplicity, word concreteness). This study suggests that the modality in group communication should be considered, particularly with respect to the breaks in discourse cohesion that are more prominent in typed group chat. More information is available here.