How have you been? I’m sure you’ve now heard the news that I’m enrolled back in school.
Exciting, I know, but this time things are a little different. Instead of having to get up every morning and drive to class, I can just log on to my class on my computer. I log into my class, and instead of speaking out loud in a classroom, we type our comments and answers into a forum. We have two different types of forums, one is the entire class and the teacher and the other is for just my teacher and I only. Something my assignments are submitted to the classroom forum and sometimes they are submitted to the forum for just the teacher and I. The forums, however, can be used in a couple different ways. I could submit an assignment into the classroom forum, and if one of the other students had a question about something on it, they can ask a question and then later I can respond to it. By asking and answering questions this way, or giving and receiving feedback, they are threaded together. That’s why this is called threaded discussion. Another way of having threaded discussion in the classroom forum would be that the teacher could ask a question that we would all have to answer. When the teacher posts the question onto the forum we are able to click on the question to respond to it. This helps keep everything organized and not mixed up everywhere. Now, I know you’re probably asking yourself, does she have to be logged on at a certain time everyday? And the answer is, no. I just have to respond, give feedback or submit an assignment on a certain number of days each week. This is called asynchronous communication, because we’re not all logged on at the same time. You actually deal with this a lot at work. Mail is another form for asynchronous communication along with emails and fax. It all sounds pretty confusing and I know it’s a lot to take in at once, but maybe sometime I can bring my laptop over and show you how it works sometime. Well I’ve got homework to do now so I...