Writingfly posted this quote from a print article, Harasim's "Teaching and learning online: Issues in designing computer-mediated graduate courses":

"On-line learning had: 'this continual sense of interaction. In the back of the classroom you can doodle quite happily; you're not expecting to be participating continously. However, when you are at the computer, you are wasting your own time. You are either there to read notes, or to respond to notes. You are constantly required to be engaging with the computer, and that is very different from a classroom situation where, yes, you are supposed to be listening to a lecture but when you click off and draw a few circles and click back on again...'" (125).

I just posted some half thought out musing to Terra's site, but here's an attempt to refine it further. In writing classes online, where we stress frequent writing through community interaction, student engagement is more apparent through their writing than we can typically be aware of in a classroom where only one voice can speak at a time. The rest may be merely thinking about a math test, the boy in the floor above in the dorm, the argument that they had with a sibling, or how much they hate our class. Could online venues necessarily encourage more engagement by students? Does this also suggest the importance of frequent written response at the expense of heavy reading loads in online classes for other disciplines, to guarantee that students are engaging with the class? Something to think about :)