|
| Electronic Conferencing: Productive Use | Things you should do:
1. Plan student activities weeks before the semester starts.
2. Create an outline of different types of activities that challenge students to utilize the conference's potential as more of the semester progresses:
• personal introductions
• chapter summaries
• literature reviews
• group debates
• "fieldwork" assignments (case studies)
• short research projects
• proposal writing
3. Require students to log in at least twice every week (early during the week to enter their comment to a topic, and later that week to read and respond to replies others have made to that topic).
4. Distinguish between two types of conferences: (a) formal and (b) informal ones. The previous are for official class or group-project discussion; the latter are for social networking and peer support.
5. Social support activities are very important for a class. They present the emotional glue that motivates students to learn together and to learn from each other (rather than only from the teacher).
6. Informal conferences should be open to the whole course, whereas some formal conferences need to be reserved as group work-space.
7. Provide students with thorough handouts and training (step classes or demonstrations) on the use of the software and conference, but then make them responsible for familiarizing themselves and each other with the technology.
8. Set aside enough time (create labs, if necessary) to allow students to collaborate in groups.
9. As early as week one or two, pair students up into "learning partnerships" that help them communicate about the unusual format of the course.
10. Enter a controversial topic related to the class content each week and request that students to discuss it electronically.
11. Make students work with the transcripts of the whole electronic class discussion (best toward the end of the semester). You are able to do it by saving or extracting overriding issues for the whole semester and assigning student teams to defend either a pro or a contra position searching through the whole conference.
12. Create multiple conferences/subconferences for your course. Thus you can keep each one focused on one purpose (one for socializing, one for assisting each other with technical advice, one for sharing literature references, one for each small-group discussion, one for the weekly discussion topics, and the like).
|
|
