Asynchronous Tools and Technologies

Tools and technologies that are asynchronous in nature support a form of communication where the sending of a message and the reception of the message are separated by a time delay as opposed to occurring in real time. The use of asynchronous technology in education goes back to the mid-1800s when universities began to offer correspondence courses with print and written documents as the primary mechanism for communications between instructors and students. As a result, print and written correspondence was and continues to be used to support communication where instructors and students are geographically separated and where one-to-one exchanges in communications are delayed, intermittent, or distributed over time. This entry defines asynchronous tools and technologies and discusses frameworks used to categorize them.

From an historical and educational perspective, asynchronous technologies can be at the most basic level, defined as a tool that facilitates and mediates communication between instructors and students separated by both time and place. However, rapid advancements in electronic technologies over the last century, particularly in the last decade, have produced such novel and diverse communication tools, the 2 × 2 (same vs. different × place versus time) framework first articulated by Dan Coldeway to define the differences between synchronous and asynchronous technologies (see Figure 1) no longer provides an adequate means of fully distinguishing and defining the functions that asynchronous technologies can serve as an instructional tool.

Figure 1 Coldeway’s taxonomy for categorizing distance education

Source: Adapted by Allan Jeong, based on framework from “Learner Characteristics and Success,” by D. Coldeway, 1986, in I. Mugridge & D. Kaufman (Eds.), Distance Education in Canada, pp. 81–87. London, UK: Croom-Helm.

To better understand the defining characteristics of asynchronous technologies in general, more elaborate frameworks have been developed to classify the technologies across various dimensions. From the physical aspect of place and time, Jonathan Grudin expanded on Coldeway’s 2 × 2 framework by making a further distinction between different but predictable versus different but [Page 59]unpredictable to form a 3 × 3 framework. From a social network perspective, Steve Giffin developed a 3 × 4 taxonomy (see Figure 2) based on direction of exchanges (one-way vs. two-way asynchronous versus two-way synchronous) and number of participants (1 to 1 vs. 1 to few versus 1 to many vs. many to many).

Figure 2 Giffin’s taxonomy of Internet technologies on the social dimension

Source: Adapted by Allan Jeong from “A Taxonomy of Internet Applications for Project Management Communication,” by S. D. Giffin, 2002, Project Management Journal, 33(4), p. 43.

Giffin’s framework reveals that the primary tools that support asynchronous communication and learning are e-mail, Web-based groupware, and discussion groups. Among the latest and most comprehensive frameworks is one proposed by Tao Luo and colleagues that crosses the number of people (public, group, dyadic) with the social mode of communication (presentation, conversation, collaboration) as presented in Table 1. More importantly, Luo and colleagues crossed this framework with the dimension of time (real time, intermittent, shift time) to produce a 3 × 3 × 3 framework that they used to characterize and define the latest communication tools. Using this 3D framework, some of the noted tools that support asynchronous communication (intermittent and time shift) are e-mail, Twitter, and wikis.

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