Students filter in the room with their heads downs, feet dragging, and plop languidly into their seats. Trying to get them to participate in the class discussion is like pulling teeth because it's an early morning class and you can see the fatiuge on their faces. It's not that they aren't invested in the class that day-okay, on occasion that's the case-but that they're just not fully awake.
An instructor has difficulty in always touching upon all of the points he/she wanted to make in a class. Sometimes the class gets hung up on a topic, the conversation moves in a different direction, people are asking questions, and before the teacher knows it, the class time is over. Somehow those brilliant and thought-provoking questions were just never addressed to the students.
The cases listed above are extremely common and are both good reasons why utilizing some form of threaded discussions can be helpful in a class. There are a multitude of other practical reasons, of course, as this article points out. Regardless of the reason a thread is began, allowing both students and instructors the time to analyze readings and formulate thoughts-posting along the way-can be extremely beneficial, especially for various forms of learners. Since many instructors present so much material in an auditory manner, those that do not digest and comprehend material very well in this manner may be able to do so by visually seeing the same ideas and questions presented to them on screen.
3 comments:
I love the first line of your post... thinking back to past semesters, when I taught at 10am, that was what I saw every morning! Then, of course, you'd have the one student who comes in with a 32-oz cup of Mountain Dew, and can't sit still all class... anyhoo, I was thinking that threaded discussions are also useful for summarizing in-class discussion. We can certainly use them to extend discussion outside of class, but one thing that I always forget to do (or run out of time) is to go back and make some conclusion points at the end of each class. I think that a threaded discussion would provide an excellent opportunity for an instructor to do that... and even allow time for class discussion to "gel," so that when you're writing out your conclusions, you've had time to reflect on what was REALLY said in class.
We mentioned the form that our blogs were taking and I really enjoyed the creative writing that you used as your intro for this blog. It inspires me to be a bit more artistic in my blog format. As far as your thoughts on threaded discussions I agree and wonder if there some resources that provide interesting ways to literally "wake up" students who are not participating through discussion?
I never really thought about the specific benefits of using a threaded discussion with an early class. Great point!
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