The relative newness of online education to most teachers and students means that the virtual classroom is largely uncharted social space; teachers and students must deliberately consider how and when they will enter into the virtual classroom and where and how they will locate themselves and each other within it. This study uses the concepts of "time-space separation" and "disembedding," drawn from Giddens's work on globalization, to identify how teachers and students in one virtual classroom

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... onstructed social relations in synchronous and asynchronous Web-based forums. Using discourse-analytic methods, the study illuminates the discursive processes through which the teacher and students rearticulated conventional classroom discourse to create hybrid, student-controlled/teacher-centered spaces. The authors identify the challenges and potentials of such classrooms for teachers and raise several questions for further investigation into, and theorizing about, teaching and teachers' work in the virtual classroom. The emergence of the virtual university classroom and online educational forums has been heralded both as opening possibilities for new, more powerful learning experiences and as inhibiting the creation of communities of practice in which learning is situated. Whether one sees the glass of the virtual classroom as half full or half empty, the relative newness of online education to most teachers and students means that the virtual classroom is largely uncharted space. When teachers and students enter the face-to-face university classroom, they hold commonly shared expectations about how the social relations through which teaching and learning occur are constituted within it. Teachers and students do not so much expect to define social space and interaction within face-to-face classrooms as they expect to find their place within it. By contrast, in the current era when online classes are new and unspecified, teachers and students may share few, if any, expectations and conventions. Instead, teachers and students must