Not sure where to ask, but this seems as good a place as any.
I discovered the chat yesterday and I notice there were a lot of them last year, but none are actually scheduled this year.
Are guest chats fortuitous events or are they planned?
Will there be more of them?
Is there any chance that Steven Pinker might come back?
k
these are questions for Anu -- from the list of concluded chats you can see that there was a flurry of them early last year, only two in the second half of the year and none so far this year.
http://home.mn.rr.com/wwftd/
Am I alone, or do other people here find chat boards difficult to cope with?
The remarks come in such a muddled order, and only about half of them are worht reading, so it hardly seems worth the hassle - or have I got it all wrong (again!
)
Like anything new, Rhu, chat skills can be acquired with practice, if you find a chat room with discussions worth the effort. Many - if not most - chatrooms seem to degenerate into flirtfests, but I have found a couple of sufficient worth that I stuck around long enough to learn how to follow the conversation threads.
The best way to get the hang of it is to find a fairly empty room, so that you just have a couple of people to talk to and you are all talking along the same thread. Once you get the hang of it, then, as people come in and start diverging from the main conversation, you'll find that you can still follow what is going on.
Chat rooms which permit you to create your own rooms, so that you can have a quiet conversation with select company, can be very convenient for planning sessions and such. And easier to set up than conference calls.
I'd be happy to tutor you.
The remarks come in such a muddled order, and only about half of them are worth reading
This would be what we call a moderated chat. You submit questions and Anu filters them, keeping things flowing relatively calmly. This was where we had the Richard Lederer chat, was it not? It suffered early on from mindless hero worship but finally some decent questions came filtering through. You just had to be patient.
>It suffered early on from mindless hero worship...
and, truth be told, Richard seemed rather more interested in flogging his previous work than in opening up any new areas of discussion. but as has been pointed out, the latter is difficult in this sort of venue.
http://home.mn.rr.com/wwftd/
Agreeing with Faldage's and tsuwm's assessment of Mr. Lederer, though I would not have expressed it so gently or gentilely.
For moderated chats, I think the most annoying thing is that when the room is full, the chances of your questions getting through is pretty slim.
Chats, in general, are like tides except not so regular. The quality of the conversation rises and falls with that of the participants. But even when interesting, articulate, and affable members are present in critical numbers, it takes some effort on the part of the participants to keep a good thread on track.
OTOH, one might easily wait one to three hours for a good discussion to catch hold and said discussion might last 15 to 90 minutes, say. Ninety minutes is rare. Most are probably in the 20 to 30 minute range. (Just throwing out WAGs here, I've never actually checked.) In any case, it's not a great return on investment, unless you're expecting one hell of a cool conversation. I usually only wait while I'm reading, programming, or browsing. Otherwise, it's just not worth the effort.
Then there's the matter of etiquette. A lot of people use the chat rooms as their private therapy sessions. Others assume that everyone else owes them entertainment. "You geeks are sooo boring." Some are just needy or impatient. "Why isn't anyone talking to me?" The time spent waiting for the conch to arrive can be a very, very long two hours if you don't have anything else to occupy your mind.
k