Fantasy Island Meets The Real World: Using Online Discussion Forums In Collaborative Learning

By Author: White
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Forty-one ninth-grade students and their two teachers climbed back onto the two school buses to return to their own towns after a windy spring day at Mahoney State Park. Among us were copies of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, maps and brochures for student-designed Utopian societies, plastic spears and flower leis, some new friendships, and swirls of thoughts about how much Omega Replica(http://www.bestwatches4u.com/omega-c-340.html) and how deeply we had learned from each other.

Back in the classroom the next day, my students basked in pride and amazement that we had been able to pull off the monumental endeavor known as the Tribal Paradise Project. I asked students to log onto the online forums that had been central to our work and to reflect on their use of the forums themselves. Ashley wrote.

I really liked talking on the forum. Everyone was very active and people were a lot more interested in other's opinions. There are only a couple negative things about the forum. People can be misunderstood because when you read someone else's opinion, you don't get to hear their tone of voice to judge whether they ...
... are angry or just stating something. I prefer talking on the forum. I'm a lot more interested in being able to look at what other people say and respond on my own time.

Ashley's comments reflect her awareness of both the advantages and complexities of writing online—encountered daily by adults while we do the real-world collaborative work of coordinating with colleagues, managing projects, and negotiating different agendas through the convenience of online communication. For the last two years in my classroom, students had been using online forums to discuss literature and to share writing. I learned about the forums from my Nebraska Writing Project friend and colleague, Jeff Grinvalds, who had invited me to participate in a wonderfully productive online collaboration between our two schools. Jeff showed me how online discussion forums could be used to vastly expand the amount of writing feedback students could share to create much more accessible class discussions. Our students enjoyed the cross-school interaction, but Jeff and I both wanted to use the forums in a way that would move students toward the kind of computer multiliteracies that Stuart Selber Breitling Replica Watches(http://www.bestwatches4u.com/breitling-c-104.html) describes in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Selber promotes the teaching of different kinds of computer literacy that include functional, critical, and rhetorical literacy—the ability to use, question, and produce technology. Jeff and I knew that students were already using the online discussion forums quite well, but we wanted to see if we could up the rhetorical ante by asking students to create and manage discussion threads for their own purposes.