synthetic thinking

They describe distance education in general and their conversation-based approach specifically, including communication venues related to teaching with voice, with text, and in real time and their affordances, and instructional conversation strategies and how they work in each mode; the instructional conversation strategies of saturating and modeling and how they work in different communication venues; the strategies of corralling, orchestrating interactions, and scaffolding synthetic thinking; the role of feedback and the forms it can take online; the instructional design strategy of content chunking and its elements; and the future of online instruction.

In addition, the length and quality of the individual essays vary greatly, from fourteen pages to sixty-two, and from original research in a very small niche to truly insightful synthetic thinking. This straying from the central theme, the heavy Scandinavian focus, the lack of real temporal or geographical coverage, constitute the unevenness.