Holding my tongue

(Not a pretty sight!)

Ran into the old problem of not knowing how much to write in response to the activities. Asking students to send a 'brief message' to the forum is fine, but when there are multiple questions to answer & you're still trying to make a good impression, it's hard to know when to stop. This is where the decision not to release TMA questions until later has an unfortunate side-effect. If we're being assessed on our contributions, which will count for more: demonstrating understanding of the subject matter by a thorough, carefully crafted post that addresses all the points raised for consideration, or demonstrating understanding of the medium by a selective & incisive response to just a couple of issues?

Content versus form, innit?

So I posted a few 'ones I prepared earlier' then did the sums: (12 students x 5 activities x 500 words) + (12 students x 2 responses x 60 initial posts) = Too Much.

There's a balance to be struck between ensuring a learning forum remains active/vibrant, & not letting it become overwhelming for anyone who logs in a few days later than the others, takes one look & decides life is too short to plough through all the verbiage that's already there. I do already try to strike that balance in the online tutorials I run for new undergraduates: I post single questions & have a standard form of words to encourage tongue-holding ('Just a couple of sentences please - this is a discussion starter, not an essay'). On the other hand as a student I resented the invitation on a previous module to discuss Deep Issues in no more than 50 words. It's tricky.

So for the next activity I abandoned my pre-written answer & started an argument about plagiarism instead ;-)