Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Community Part I - Discussion Boards

I was going to cover cheating but decided that I need to do a little research. In the meantime, I am going to talk about the Online Education Community. Granted, my experience has been limited, one school and not even two full quarters yet, but I can always change my mind later if my first impression turns out to be wrong. This issue is about working together, how students help teach each other whether they know it or not.

I posted once before about discussion board projects but I want to elaborate a little bit more on this topic. Many of you that use the Internet as a research tool will catch this first analogy right away. There are a few web sites that I use frequently to track down technology problems I have to solve at work. Most of them offer forums for us to post a description of the problem and other people will read the post and respond with their experience or additional documentation that might know about. These forum posts hang around out there and help others find solutions to the problems they have without them even having to ask anyone for help. The class discussion boards are like this in some ways. Our initial posts are usually a solution to a problem or a recommendation based on a class scenario. It doesn't stop there though. We are required to post comments about other people's posts as part of the assignment. The more active students will even banter a little bit in defense of their stated positions. When we're lucky and get responses between some astute students there can be some pretty good conversations where we can learn more about the issues at hand. This reinforces the work we did researching the topic tremendously and it's kind of fun too.

Admittedly, it is pretty rare to see a long banter session but not all topics really have a lot of angles to them. One thing we do get with every assignment though is a different spin on what we have discovered. If you're in a class like this, try to make a point to read a lot of other posts even if you don't respond to them all. You will learn a lot from people that think a little differently than you do. In the technology industry there are a lot of ways to do things and the last place you want to be is stuck in your ways. If that happens, you'll be left behind, maybe without a job. I have seen this happen to others first-hand.

Finally I want to give a testimony on the discussion board concept from my own experience. Just a couple weeks ago we had an assignment where we had to look at an existing network setup for a fairly small company. Each of the three departments in the company had their own network and they were all very different. Our assignment was to come up with some options for merging the networks and connecting them to the new parent company as they had been bought out. It was the beginning of the quarter and we had just had a two-week break from classes. I work in a Microsoft shop so over that two weeks I had gotten back into my Microsoft-centric ways and totally ignored Linux as a serious option in the assignment. I also missed the part about the parent company being a primarily Linux shop. Duh! Well, two classmates quickly pointed out my error and I was forces to admit the mistake. Being such an obvious blunder I am not sure I would have gotten such a good grade had those two not chimed in with their comments and given me the opportunity to correct myself. Not only that, but on the next assignment (a PowerPoint presentation) I gave Linux its proper position beside Windows Server 2003 as a contender in this environment. So, simple comments of constructive criticism from two intelligent students helped me get two A's in a row.

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