Our discussion

Hi everybody!

I just checked the forum and I can see that you've started posting. Thank you for that! I would like to make sure that we have a chance to experience a set of productive online discussions before we meet face to face to discuss our online experience on week 3. Here are a few cues to make this happen:

• Please take a few minutes to respond to other people's introduction. Try to get to know them and think about what you would do as a teacher to get to know your students better (social presence), to give them a chance to know you and to create a sense of community.

• Make sure to respond to other people's posts on the reading as soon as you can so that they have a chance to respond to you. If we all wait until Wednesday, we will have a collection of isolated answers, and no dialogue. I guess I just learned sth about setting up deadlines for online discussions :-)
  

• Academic online asynchronous discussions (that's a mouthful!) are unique:

1. Unlike in a classroom setting, you have ample time to read an answer, think about it, go back to the reading and craft a response.
2. This type of discussion is definitely less spontaneous than classroom discussions but it can have a lot more depth.
3. Some of my teachers would require that we actually quote the readings in our answers (when relevant of course). I felt it was an excellent preparation to the paper we would end writing at the end of the week.
4. While online discussions can be very productive, they need to be carefully designed. We'll brainstorm ways to make them work in our chat next week.
   

• Here is the initial questionnaire! Please, fill it out as soon as you can.

Thank you!If you have any questions, e-mail me! Have a great weekend!