"For what should a man live if not for the pleasures of discourse?"
-from Plato's Phaedrus
Socrates answers his friend by exploring the responsibility, literally the obligation to construct thoughts that merit response, that a speaker has to his or her audience. He remarks that Phaedrus' love of discourse is "superhuman" and "simple marvelous," both in its intensity and in its ability to infect others with a similar desire. This left-handed compliment is meant to correct Phaedrus' irresponsible desire to speak without being informed.
The tension explored in Phaedrus between our compulsion to speak and our responsibility to ensure that such speech is informed is a productive way to enter into the debate of how communication should be approached in the age of information technology, when communication has never been so immediate or pervasive.
Our project is interested in exploring the effects of implementing the technology of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) in the classic university classroom, a space which is being redefined as we speak and in fact the more that we speak. We are interested specifically in how the dynamics of a class, moderate in size, changes with the introduction of CMC. The class facilitator, by supplementing face-to-face communication with Synchronous and Asynchronous CMC, allows inter-class communications to become more frequent and more personal, and if directed correctly, more Socratic. It is possible to utilize the seemingly widespread "superhuman" desire to communicate through information technology to counteract negative trends such as growing class size.
Imagine a classroom closer to the Socratic ideal
