Real-time discussions generate ideas, help create a learning community in online classes, provide discussion transcripts, let more get said in less time, provide a means of online conference and collaboration, and get students thinking in writing as they write. Discussion posts tend to be short, so students very often need to clarify and amend messages. They need to ask for clarifications and follow up, or they find ways to jump into someone else's argument and extend it or critique it. Again, all in writing. It provides an instant audience, and a way to explore voice. Course tools have chat rooms, or you can use MOO's, wonderful programs that create a spatial sense of place.

1. Visit a MOO when you have the chance. Every Tuesday night, The Netoric Project hosts the Tuesday Cafe in Connections MOO, which itself offers a wealth of information for teachers who want to use MOO's in their classes; Netoric and Connections are the friendliest ways I know of to get started MOOing.
2. Have a chat with your class. But before starting, have them write online in a discussion board post or simple editor like Notepad. Once in the chat, have them summarize what they wrote. This shows the difference off the bat between writing for 15 minutes or so on one's own, and then sharing one's thoughts with a group. Direct students to respond to one another in the chat. Record the session.
3. Pause during a chat and have all your students stand up. Have them find a line they wrote, and tell them to all read out loud at once. This shows how in a chat, more people can speak during a class period than can in an oral discussion, where people need to take turns. (In MOO's you can creat tools for turn-taking, presentations, slide shows and so on.)
4. Save the chat transcripts and have students start an essay by cutting and pasting statments from the chat into the file that they wrote in before the chat started.