Discussion Forums

My primary experience with, and only active participation in Discussion Boards to date has been through my enrolment at MIT in the Graduate Certificate in Applied eLearning. Two out of three of the papers I have completed utilised the Discussion Board within the learning Management System Blackboard.

In both instances discussion topics were posted by the paper coordinator as either a group activity or an individual task, however all student’s individual participation and contribution was awarded a mark which contributed to the overall course grade.
My initial reaction to the Discussion Board activities in my first paper was one of moderate anxiety, and nervousness, primarily due to the wider audience my ‘written work’ would be viewed, critiqued and judged by! My participation in the Discussions was minimal and was only forthcoming after quite some time spent ‘lurking’ and several ‘false starts’. The ‘lurking’ I recall made me feel slightly uneasy, almost like I was indulging in some form of illicit activity or cheating to some extent, however it was helpful, as it gave me some idea of the style of writing used in the Discussion Boards. The Style adopted by other students all varied somewhat however, and I do remember a couple of posts That I read early on were very formally written, rather long and referenced to the hilt… which I found really intimidating, and actually made the underlying meaning and content of the post almost indiscernible. Eventually I came across more informally written posts which were firmly rooted in actual experience … and finally I felt confident enough to post myself.

My next experience with Discussion board tasks was a lot more enjoyable, and as I had had some previous experience I was far more confident and did not suffer from any hesitation to post whatsoever. As all of the students participating were aware of ‘netiquette’ any comments posted and subsequent responses were always very cordial, and comments constructive. In fact I would say that this was an ideal initiation into the Discussion forum experience as you are highly unlikely to experience any flaming or negatively worded feedback, which I have come across several times in public forums on the net.

I still have a problem with regard to perceiving each and every posting, albeit Discussion Board or Blog as, ‘written work’ of sorts, I realise that I am not expected to write an essay, (nor would one be welcome!) however my mental preparation (I guess) toward it is as if it was. This can be very time consuming and a source of personal annoyance! Becoming more relaxed with regard to putting my musings out there for others to see is a continual challenge…..

Unfortunately the challenge proved too great for me with regard to joining a Discussion Forum. I lurked in numerous public forums over several weeks, but lacked the courage to ‘commit’ to any particular group. Although I am the first to admit that yes - I was a bit scared, being a bit of a ‘sissy’ to join, I also honestly could not find a single forum that really made me want to be part of their online community!

Firstly, finding a group based on my areas of interest was a bit of a mission, I searched several sites and found Google groups and Yahoo had the most, but was also confusing to search. Once I found some potential groups I soon found that many were private, or had between 150 – 300+ members, or alternatively less than 20 and inactive. The majority of Forums I 'researched' were moderated.