Wednesday, June 5, 2013

The Discussion Board (a Mash-up of Perspectives): The Third Pillar of Digital Learning

Up For Debate
All courses are ecologies of learning. There is an interrelationship between each activity in the course – each activity affects the other. In order to get the most out of online learning I would suggest that there are three main pillars that should be a part of most courses – especially in social sciences and the humanities. These three pillars are: (1) Journaling, (2) Blogging, and (3) Discussion Boards.

I see each of these online activities as being interrelated and as contributing to different aspects of learning.

While journaling is an interior activity of intimate learning, between the teacher and the student, and blogging is an exterior activity of public learning, in which the student learns by teaching, the discussion board is an exterior activity of interactive learning, consisting largely of brainstorming between students.

The key to writing a good discussion board post is that builds on what other people are saying and it adds something new. It does not have to agree with previous posts, but it should respond to them in some way – either by providing a new spin to what has already been said, or by providing an alternative perspective that contradicts other perspectives, or by taking the thread in a different direction altogether while staying on topic. Discussion board posts are short blasts of ideas and information. Discussion board posts are best when they are interactive. The question that should be going through someone’s mind, as they are writing the post, is “What am I introducing to this discussion that will be new?”

As students bring different perspectives and experiences to the virtual or physical classroom there is an opportunity for highly creative thought to occur. Creative insights often occur where there is a mash-up of ideas. The most useful discussions take place when people notice different details about the content they have all been exposed to. This activity is particularly useful because each person is likely to notice something that someone else missed. A classroom of full of different observations and impressions helps all of us to “see” things more broadly originally. Usually it is the details that each person notices that makes a discussion board post interesting.

Just as journaling makes digital learning an intimate interaction between the teacher and the student; and blogging allowing students to teach the teacher, and other students and to disseminate ideas far and wide; the discussion board uses the digital environment to foster collaborative learning and creative interaction.

The discussion board works best if it is thought of as being a mental mash-up. There are different ways to go about this. The most obvious form of mash-up is when several people have different perspectives on the same content. When this occurs, participants will be most effective if they take time to examine how they arrived at their different conclusions, interpretations, or opinions. What “evidence” were they looking at? At what point did they come to see things as they do? What experiences led them to their conclusion? What are they basing their conclusion on?

By the way, these are also good questions for a person to ask himself or herself when writing journal entries. It is all interactive.

When a person takes the time to describe how they arrived at their conclusions the discussion provides more insight than it does when people are simply contradicting one another. As I said before, details are important. It is useful to discuss the different details that caught our attention and impacted us in different ways. It is also useful to discuss our differences in how we chose to interpret those details.

Another approach to this interactive mash-up of perspectives on the discussion board is when students have the same observations, conclusions, and interpretations, but build on what the previous student has said by providing new examples. When this happens in a discussion board thread the interpretations that students have are mostly similar, but the new information that each student brings to the discussion consists of bringing different applications of the perspective to the discussion.

In either case, contrast or agreement, the intellectual mash-up is one in which each participant adds to the overall discussion by introducing something new, not by merely agreeing with what the person who went before them said.

It is so important that students introduce something new in each discussion board post that I tend to give very little, if any, credit to posts that merely say, in essence, “me too.”

It basically comes down to this: If you cannot add something new to what people have already said, by presenting an alternative perspective or interpretation, then add something new by providing a new “spin”, or new angles to an existing line of thought – but always, always, always bring something new to the discussion.

Students will often find that ideas that bubbled up in their journal, or in the discussion board, can be refined and reworked into compelling blog posts. Likewise, discussion board activity, and responses to one’s blog, can send a student back to his or her journal to reflect on these ideas in a quieter and more intimate setting. This is why the most effective use of journaling, blogging, and participation on the discussion board is to make these activities interactive and to allow ideas that are developed in one activity to feed off of those developed in another.

It is hard to assign a grade value for creativity and originality. It is practically antithetical to try to grade brainstorming, where students are riffing off of each other. Still, to keep people focused and to ensure quality contributions to the discussion board, it is necessary to have rubric for this activity. My rubric for discussion boards tends to look something like this:

The discussion board activity will be graded based on the following criteria: (1) staying on the topic for the thread, (2) providing new insights into content from the course, (3) explaining how you arrived at your perspective, interpretation, or opinion, and (4) commenting and giving meaningful responses to other people’s posts. 


I generally encourage at least one discussion board post per class session. Because the discussion board works best if it develops as quick blasts of new information, yet these blasts should be substantive, most posts will average about 150 words. I usually allow discussion boards to represent about 20% of the final grade for the course.

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