Role-playing

The pedagogical activity Role-playing is very common in offline settings, but can also be effectively implemented online. In this e-tivity the students are usually given pre-defined roles or tasks to act as if they were a known scientist or inventor, historical persona, manager of a company, customer, etc. The situation background for role-playing has to be well defined, as well as the theoretical foundation or educational goal(s) of the the task. Also, the procedure for role-playing has to be sufficiently precise and the students have to be familiar with the technology so that it doesn't affect their behavior when they enact a certain role/character. The role-playing task can be performed offline (in face-to-face interaction) and videotaped. In this case the video clips can be placed on YouTube or some other video-sharing website. Other Internet tools that can be used for role-playing include chatrooms, instant messaging, and forums. The text/transcript of the role-playing interaction can also be written in a wiki or blog and commented.

This e-tivity can be very well supported with the use of many online communication tools including chat and instant messaging (Google Talk, Google Wave), collaborative writing (SpringNote, Zoho), wiki and blog, and social networking tools for learning communities (Ning, SocialGo).