Using discussion format to encourage conversation

    I’ve been thinking about how using different kinds of Moodle discussions encourages or discourages discussion.

    While there are four variants, they display in really just two formats.  The first shows the prompts with separate discussion threads.  The second shows the prompts with replies nested underneath.

    Why is this important?  Because while the second is one conversation and the first is potentially many conversations – which might seem like too much trouble and thus keep students from participating.

The first option I’m talking about here is the default.  The Standard forum format looks like the image to the right.

        When you click on the student’s thread, you then get to see the post and replies.  Each thread is a separate conversation.  For many activities, this is exactly what I want.

• Perhaps I want each student to post their ideas before they can see any other students’ ideas (Q & A forum).  
• Perhaps I want students to maintain separate discussions (in the case of Two-Way Journals, where pairs of students are reading the same book and talking about it).  (Standard forum for general use)  
• Perhaps I want the information organized in separate threads, as I do with vocabulary, where there is a separate thread for each word.   

    But when I really want a conversation on one topic, I don’t always get that with this Standard Forum format.  What often happens is that students click on threads started by their friends, and ignore those started by others.  There can be a very active conversation that other students may not even see.

    So I’m rethinking this.  I want real conversations among all students.  That means I’ll use A Single Simple Discussion format more often – the second option I talked about above.  This format looks like this.  I can display this in summary form, as shown here, or with each post showing:

    This is what you see within the different threads of the Standard Format, but here it’s the single thread, the single discussion. 

    I’ll have to balance this against the desire to see students’ original thinking (because the “me, too” tendency is strong).  This also means I have to divide the class into groups to keep the reading involved in the conversations manageable – but that’s a post for another day.

Spillover - online discussion comes back to F2F class

    Two exciting things I’m seeing.
photo © 2007 Justin Henry | more info (via: Wylio)

     First, the conversation that may have started in class, then extended and deepened online – continues back in class.  All seamlessly. 

     And kids who used to be silent in class are talking.  I’m not seeing the same 4 or 5 hands.  Now, I’m seeing a forest of hands; kids who never used to ask questions or make comments are part of the F2F conversation.

     I would love for somebody to do research on this.

Writing about the N-word

    I always get a bit nervous when we get to this discussion, which I’ve used online for three years now.  My 8th graders are reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and talking about the N-word is an important part of understanding the book and its historical context. 

    I make clear up front that kids are not to use the word, either speaking or writing.  I also tell them that some people think they shouldn’t read this book, because those people think they can’t distinguish between a word they read and a word they can say – which my students find insulting.

    At the start, I thought kids might just parrot ideas from the readings I gave them (which included an Ebony editorial, and an article about censorship of the word in a dramatic version of To Kill a Mockingbird).  There was a bit of that, but while middle school kids can suck up, they tend to leap directly from brain to output, without benefit of a whole lot of editing. 

    What happened in the discussion forum was a real conversation, with kids saying what they really think.  From one telling people to get used to hearing the N-word since it is popular in the black community, to another stating the word should be able to be used by either all groups or none, to another asking about its use in literature (we had been talking about the Huck Finn controversy). 

    Here’s another cool thing.  The work was due before Tuesday morning, but here it is Wednesday night and they’re still posting to the discussion.  When they’re not interested, the conversation stops on the due date.  But here, there have already been two extra days of discussion so far. 
   
    And everybody is part of the conversation, including those who never used to talk in class.  This is one of the things I like about online discussion - everybody gets to play.

Explaining Twitter

    So I was with a colleague explaining how I had “met” another colleague via Twitter; we converse all the time, even though we’ve never seen each other face to face.  Blank look.  What’s Twitter again?

    Twitter is a way of expanding your professional network: those colleagues you bounce ideas off, people you get ideas from, people who share interesting articles/lessons/resources/websites.  While I read and comment on blogs, what I was looking for was professional conversation – I found it on Twitter.
    Here is a tiny part of a recent conversation from Twitter, a chat about homework in middle school.  @name is the speaker, #midleved is the hashtag that pulls all these Tweets together.

• @mthman:   Welcome back to the #midleved chat! I hope you had a good week in the classroom (or of spring break, like me!). Let's talk homework.
• @mthman:  During the first week(s) of school, what do you tell your students/parents to expect via homework? #midleved
• @francesblo:  How much time is reasonable for HW? #midleved
• @cybraryman1:  My daily HW was for students to either read, watch or listen to the major news stories. We would discuss in class next day #midleved
• @cybraryman1:  Years later a student in college thanked me for having do the current events assignment. He didn’t appreciate it then. #midleved
• @mthman:  That depends...do you account for other teachers in the building also? RT @francesblo: How much time is reasonable for HW? #midleved
• @rushtheiceberg:   #midleved Homework, in my class, is either extended time to finish classwork, or independent pract/refinement of close to mastered concepts
• @cybraryman1:  [reply to]  @mthman Good point. You don't want to overburden students #midleved
• @cybraryman1:  The key is providing HW that is not just busy work. You want them to think #midleved
• @francesblo:  In my school, daily HW in English, Math, less often other subjects #midleved
• @brianwyzlic [reply to]@francesblo 30 minutes/day seems about right, but we need to make sure we look cross-curricular, which is tough day-to-day #midleved
• @mthman:  Do you "grade" HW or merely provide feedback? #midleved

    This went on for an hour, ranging over how much work to assign, busy work, if practice should be done in class or as homework, types of homework for different subjects, should there be homework at all.  It was like sitting around the table with about 20 others who are interested in middle school education – the kind of energizing experience you might get once a year at a conference. 

    Wouldn’t you like to have that kind of experience every week, a couple of times a week, maybe even every day?

    There are side conversations in any chat (partly because people think/pause/write at different rates).  Happily, since Twitter is a print medium, you can go back to read over what others have written to follow all the threads.  And later, you can read the archive (Twitter scrolls down, with the most recent first, so you read the archive from the bottom up.)  Here’s the archive for this discussion:  http://midlevedchatarchive.pbworks.com/w/page/38845004/Midleved-chat-04082011

    Some basic terminology using this recent #midleved chat as an example.  The hashtag # shows this is a topic, and this topic can be followed on Twitter even if you don’t “follow” all the people who are part of that conversation (very useful when you’re starting out).  The conversation goes on all week, and also during the scheduled “chat.”  You can be part of the chat, or lurk (read the tweets during the chat, but don’t say anything), or scroll back through the tweets later, or read through the archive if there is an archive for that particular hashtag’s chats.  There are many education-related chats and hashtags on Twitter, catalogued here by @cybraryman1  http://www.cybraryman.com/chats.html.

    You can set up your free Twitter account and follow conversations from http://twitter.com, by using the search function, but it’s much easier to follow the conversations associated with a particular #hashtag by using a tool like http://www.tweetdeck.com/ (free software you download).  Here, you get your regular Twitter stream (called Friends, the tweets of people you “follow”), any Mentions of your Twitter name (useful so you can respond – and you might miss these as the regular Twitter stream scrolls past), and Direct Messages (sent to you only).  But the real strength is that you can add columns for the #hashtags that interest you.  I find I’m more likely to check the #hashtags than my regular Twitter stream. 

    There are many, many wonderful resources about Twitter on the web.  Here are a few to help you get started.  Because these are conversations you want to be part of. 

• Twitter Tutorial (including video) by Josh Stumpenhorst  http://stumpteacher.blogspot.com/2010/12/twitter-tutorial.html
• Mom, this is how Twitter works by Jessica Hische: http://www.jhische.com/twitter/

Where to place Homework Help Forum

    When I first started using Moodle, I put the “homework help” discussion forum with the module that’s always “up,” which is mostly vocabulary.  This worked well for the first month or so, and students quickly started helping each other with their questions.

    But I discovered my kids were putting their homework questions in other forums.  Once we started a new unit, they often would put their questions on whichever forum they were answering questions in – and they’d get other student responses quite rapidly – but their questions really didn’t belong there.

     I wondered should I make a big deal of “this is where your questions are supposed to be”  but Moodle is just so free-form and middle schoolers really don’t get into scrolling down to get to the forum.

    During snow days I put in a general snow day forum, and that’s where all the homework questions surfaced.  That forum was in just the right place, easy to find.  I guess I’m a slow learner; I’ve been trying to keep everything organized, but the organization needs to make sense to students, not just to me.  And scrolling down just doesn’t make sense to them (and there may be a laziness factor in there, too). 

    It seems to be OK to scroll down when working with vocabulary, because all the vocabulary units are in one place.  But not when just asking a question.  Then again, vocabulary assignments are regular, while asking questions is sporadic.

    So now I’m starting to add a general discussion/homework help forum in each new unit.  This takes the place of both homework help and the off-topic/coffee klatch forums I’ve experienced in many online courses for adults.  Kids just start their irreverent conversations wherever (in f2f class, too, of course).  I don’t participate in these discussions that much, because these are side conversations that can get quite silly.  As long as students are civil, that can be their spot.

    Since I know my students also converse via Facebook and online gaming and texting, I don’t feel as strong a need to provide a “special place” for them.  Wherever they are online is “their” place.  But I am tickled they feel comfortable in the class Moodle.

    Once again, kids handle their work and their play differently than adults, so the way I organize the course has to be different, too.