Reflection on Digital Teaching

As part of the P-8 Initiative: Digital Skills for You

The project conducted an empirically grounded reflection on practical aspects of digitized teaching communication. The basis for this is authentic audio and video data from UZH courses held in Spring Semester 2020 and Fall Semester 2020 (lectures and seminars on Zoom, Adobe Connect, Teams). We directly refer to this data in our publications (videos, texts, online).

We focus on both online courses and hybrid teaching, illustrating for the different formats how the communication possibilities, shaped by technical and media factors, influence the co-construction of "presence" (through simulated and emulated perception) and fundamentally affect everyday teaching moments like question-and-answer sequences.

The analysis of authentic data enables a fundamental reflection on the digital “social situation” (Goffman 1964). This is carried out within the methodological framework of multimodal interaction analysis (Goodwin 1981; Streeck et al. 2013; Mondada 2014), with a particular focus on the interaction between interactive configuration (Hochuli 2019) and the interaction architecture (Hausendorf/Schmitt 2016) of the respective platform. An important reference is provided by media-linguistic and conversation-analytic work on interaction in digital spaces (see, for example, Marx/Schmitt 2019, Licoppe/Morel 2012).

The module is intended to support lecturers in the planning and execution of their future teaching units, particularly in choosing digital formats, by making the communicative implications of didactic decisions more transparent.

Project Duration: 2021-2023

Project Team: Prof. Dr. Heiko Hausendorf, Dr. Kenan Hochuli, MA Johanna Jud, MA Alexandra Zoller.

Institutional Affiliation: The project is linked to the SNSF project “Interaction and Architecture” //link//, from which it originated. It is part of the research initiative “Emergence and Emulation of Co-presence: How Digitalization Changes the Fundamental Conditions of Communication” at the University Research Priority Program (URPP) Language and Space and the German Department of the University of Zurich.

References:

• Goodwin, Charles (1981): Conversational Organization. Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press (Language, Thought, and Culture).
• Goffman, Erving (1964): The Neglected Situation. In: American Anthropologist (Vol. 66, No. 6, Part 2: The Ethnography of Communication), pp. 133-136.
• Hausendorf, Heiko; Schmitt, Reinhold (2016): Interaction Architecture and Social Topography: Basic Concepts of an Interactionist Spatial Analysis. In: Heiko Hausendorf, Reinhold Schmitt, and Wolfgang Kesselheim (Eds.): Interaction Architecture, Social Topography, and Interaction Space. 1st Edition. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto (Studies in German Language, 72), pp. 27-54.
• Hochuli, Kenan (2019): Turning the Passer-by into a Customer: Multi-party Encounters at a Market Stall. In: Research on Language & Social Interaction 52 (4), pp. 427-447. DOI: 10.1080/08351813.2019.1657288.
• Streeck, Jürgen; Goodwin, Charles; LeBaron, Curtis (Eds.) (2013): Embodied Interaction. Language and Body in the Material World; [Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives]. 1st Paperback Edition. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Licoppe, Christian; Morel, Julien (2012): Video-in-Interaction: “Talking Heads” and the Multimodal Organization of Mobile and Skype Video Calls. In: Research on Language & Social Interaction 45 (4), pp. 399-429. DOI: 10.1080/08351813.2012.724996.
• Marx, Konstanze; Schmidt, Axel (Eds.): Interaction and Media: Interaction-Analytic Approaches to Media-mediated Communication: Universitätsverlag Winter.
• Mondada, Lorenza (2014): The Local Constitution of Multimodal Resources for Social Interaction. In: Journal of Pragmatics 65, pp. 137-156. DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2014.04.004.