Online chat

Online chat includes web-based applications that allow communication – often directly addressed, but anonymous between users in a multi-user environment.

Online chat in a narrower sense is any kind of communication over the Internet that offers a real-time transmission of text messages from sender to receiver.

Thereby, a feeling similar to a spoken conversation is created, which distinguishes chatting from other text-based online communication forms such as Internet forums and email.

It offered several channels, each of which could accommodate up to five people, with messages appearing on all users' screens character-by-character as they were typed.

Among the earliest with a GUI was BroadCast, a Macintosh extension that became especially popular on university campuses in America and Germany.

The tool selected addresses the problem of improving the learning outcomes which cannot be solved with an asynchronous environment.

[20] Chats are valuable sources of various types of information, the automatic processing of which is the object of chat/text mining technologies.

[21] Some limitations for synchronous conferencing in learning are:[13][22] Criticism of online chatting and text messaging include concern that they replace proper English with shorthand or with an almost completely new hybrid language.

Internet chat rooms and rapid real-time teleconferencing allow users to interact with whoever happens to coexist in cyberspace.

Sven Birkerts wrote: "as new electronic modes of communication provoke similar anxieties amongst critics who express concern that young people are at risk, endangered by a rising tide of information over which the traditional controls of print media and the guardians of knowledge have no control on it".

This new literacy develops skills that may well be important to the labor market but are currently viewed with suspicion in the media and by educationalists.