"Two Roads Diverged in a Wood": Productive Digression in Asynchronous Discussion
This article (free registration required... :-9 ) by Joseph Ugoretz gives some creedence to something I have experiences over the years about online asynchronous interactions. It supports divergence well, and with some thoughtful facilitation, can converge conversations again. If we want to!
"Two Roads Diverged in a Wood": Productive Digression in Asynchronous Discussion"Digression is an obvious problem in face-to-face classes: It takes already-limited time away from planned activities and discussions. Most literature on this topic assumes the same for online courses, but Joseph Ugoretz makes a compelling argument to the contrary. Particularly in asynchronous discussion forums, he says, digression can create engaging and productive learning opportunities. Open, organic dialogue allows students to make deeper, more personal connections to the course material and to pursue threads that are particularly relevant to their scholarly interests. Ugoretz provides practical guidelines for creating flexible discussion forums, reveals how such forums can enhance both online and on-campus courses, and enumerates the benefits of letting students determine, to some extent, the direction of their learning experiences."
[via Online Facilitation List and Joseph!]
posted by Nancy White at 7:30 PM
2 Comments:
I did an experiment like this with a class in Fall04. I'm in the process of generating a white paper on it. The thing that most struck us about the class was the length and frequency of the posts to a mini blogosphere that we set up. I did require students to stay on topics of the class (didn't always happen), but did not require that they follow threads that I or others set up. I found this to be an incredible feedback mechanism (both ways).
You can get a picture of what the course interaction was like by following this URL:
http://budgibson.com/BIT320-1
I'll be pushing out our analysis at:
http://budgibson.com
and
http://thecommunityengine.com
Digression in an asynchronous environment - some love it, others hate it. Its probably connected with learning styles (perhaps global/sequential). In the Ultraversity environment, some researchers prefer the hotseat tool ( your time in the hotseat been much loved, Nancy ) while others prefer threaded discussions in FirstClass. Interestingly, the success of our latest hotseat using threaded discussions seems to be at least partly due to experience with the tool, as we tried a year ago and it was more chaotic. I suppose by chaotic I mean that there seemed to be more digressions which were harder for participants to disentangle. Great insights can result from wandering away from the main topic, but individuals perceive the value of digressions differently. Perhaps we need a magic tool which caters for a wider range of learning styles. Thanks for posting this - I was attracted by the title, hoping to be distracted from what I was working on but have found to my surprise and delight that its led me back to my work from a different direction.
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