Discussion Forums as a Tool for The Relational Construction of Knowledge

These activities use discussion forums as a place and space in which to reflect on your actions in the company of your peers. You are asked to contribute to your classmates' and your own understanding of the topics at hand by actively engaging in the discussion forums.

How do you do this?

First, you are strongly encouraged to split your time into smaller chunks so that you can ponder and reflect, before visiting the discussion boards repeatedly to have online conversations with your community. A discussion is a 'back and forth' exchange ... and back and forth and back and forth.

• Prepare: Relate the topic to your own experience and give concrete examples from your practice to support any arguments or opinions you put forth.
• Post: Engage your classmates by writing concisely and thoughtfully. Take time to think about your post. Invite people to comment - give them permission to challenge you. Use short, focused paragraphs. Stay within the word limit. You have something to say, so make sure people can hear you!
• Read: Support and encourage your classmates by asking appreciative, yet challenging questions. If you disagree with a comment, challenge your classmate to prove it. If you agree, challenge your classmate to improve it.
• Respond to all: Accept all challenges to your ideas by responding to the challenge with the spirit in which the challenge was offered - the quest for knowledge
  

The Community of Inquiry Model highlights how we make all community members feel safe through social presence – by making sure everyone understands your perspective, and the purpose of your post. You also give permission to others to challenge you, and ask questions of your classmates about their posts.

	Social Presence We make all community members feel safe to question you and to let you question them
	Teaching Presence This is the guiding force of the community. It comes from the questions that we ask each other and the answers that we give.
	Cognitive Presence Once we have social and teaching presence, we can create new knowledge through cognitive presence

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Have a look at this video that explains the community of inquiry model.

In a series of interviews on the experience of using discussion boards in these courses, some of your classmates and peers have made the following comments:

"The richest learning for me, has come out of those discussion boards and looking at other people's interpretations of things and talking to people about, or reading their experiences with varying things. And I've realized now that a lot of what I enjoy, a lot of my learning comes from is actually, from those discussion boards."

Many of the people I have interviewed found themselves actually quite surprised by the value and experiences they found in the discussion forums. For example, the following person described how the forum gave them the chance to think clearly about their own perspective on that particular issue before responding. The additional time offered by the asynchronous format allows for deeper reflection on the topic and stronger responses and understanding.

So, some of them I read two or three times, then I thought did I read this right? I didn’t respond right away, so I would read it first, step away and then come back. Sometimes I reread the notes before I responded because I thought, "I wanna get this right before my response to the person".

In other cases, people found that they were equally challenged by and benefited from providing answers to their classmates. They found that by thinking through the questions posed to them, they were able to clarify for themselves their own thoughts on the particular issue and then provide a meaningful response to their classmates.

"I think the big thing that helped me was reading other people's posts and trying to answer the questions that they had. So when I read someone else's, I actually connected and I had an answer for them. It made me feel very excited, because I was like, "Look, I'm helping this individual! I've experienced this and I've tried something and hey, here's what my experience has been."

  One way to ensure that people take time to read your post so that you receive feedback on it and can initiate a conversation, is to take the time to format your post.

I think being aware of what it looks like when someone opens it, it's like when I hand an assignment to students that's a full page of just writing, I know that they're gonna look at it and go, "Yeah, no". I feel similarly with the discussion posts. I know there's a couple of times where I would open one and it was just a wall of text and I was like, "I don't know if I'm gonna read this one", and it wasn't due from merit.