Discussion+Board+Article


 * Discussion Board Article contributions - Terrence Wolfork**

The interesting thing that I found out about the article **“**Managing Discussion Group Dynamics in E-Learning Environments**”** is **“preventing alienation.”** Alienated users often can not or will not contribute to the conversation because of the aggressiveness of a couple of individuals. This hinders learning because only those who speak the loudest are heard whereas others have important things to contribute to the topic also. There are times that I have participated in conversations that I am sure alienated others because of the technical aspect of the conversation, for example--comparing mac os to pc os. I believe that this can be avoided if the teacher takes control of the conversation and guides it back to the main principle that they are trying to get the class to discuss. For this to happen the teacher is going to have to be checking the postings at the very least daily if not a couple of times a day. In the traditional face-to-face classroom, this is comparable to students taking over the conversation and no one else participating in it. A teacher helps manage discussion in this context by encouraging others to participate and also participating in the post under another name. After teachers, rather online or traditional, become accustomed to their students, they can recognize which ones have similar behaviors and separate those into different group but the listings should be available for everyone to learn from. They may have two aggressive individuals debate opposite views of a subject and have the rest of the class participate by evaluating the debate and commenting on it.

By **Mac Barron**

I found it interesting that in the section, //Influencing behavior and the process of moderation//, several of the best practices from the article on learning teams are mentioned. In particular, having a class or team "manual" that outlines acceptible behavior and common terms. According to this article, the need for clear terminology is especially useful when dealing with students coming from the field where they are not used to thinking in general terms, but are instead used to thinking about how certain terminology relates only to their specific job. I was surprised by the figure given of how much an online instructor needs to plan to contribute to a discussion board. One quarter to one half seems a bit high, but I believe it. I'm just beginning to use wikispaces in one of my high school classes and the kids have really jumped at the chance to participate, however, we haven't done any real discussions yet. If anyone wants to check out what they have posted, they can click here.


 * Please post here, not on the discussion board.**