Designing a Discussion Activity
For my discussion activity, I was thinking about trying to have students troubleshoot a digital tool together. I would divide the class into groups of four to five students. I would then assign each group a different digital tool that they’d be responsible for exploring.
In their groups, students would work through using the tool and figure out what elements of the tool are the most difficult or confusing. Instead of immediately going to user guides or discussion forums on the internet, I would encourage them to play around with the tool they’ve been assigned and pose their questions and/or subsequent discoveries to the group.
For instance, I might assign one group TimelineJS from KnightLab. This is a very simple tool in that all they would need to do is create a Google Sheet and input data. However, there are opportunities for minimal coding to insert multimedia or customize the timeline’s appearance. The idea would be for students to brainstorm together to work through some of these processes that might be more difficult.
After the smaller groups of students work through their assigned tool together, they would be then be asked to contribute common issues and the solutions to the larger class-wide chat. Throughout the rest of the semester, students would then be able to use this as a resource as they experimented with these tools as part of their larger digital project.
Reflection
I’ve struggled a bit with online discussion in this course, and I want to figure out a way to really engage students. It may not be successful, but I am hoping that working through their frustrations with certain tools together might spark conversation. The way I often think in class discussions is by talking through the issue before I know the answer myself. I know sometimes when posting in discussion boards I spend more time trying to come up with a more well-formed answer that sounds a bit more complete, but it’s at the cost of the process that allows not fully-formed ideas to bounce off one another to collectively reach a stronger, well-rounded answer. My goal is to find a way to encourage more casual conversation, which may be heavily influenced by platform or technology.