Designing
Electronic Discussions:
Letters, Role-playing, and Dialogues
Conference
on College Composition and Communication
Denver, March 2001
Donna Reiss, Tidewater Community College-Virginia
Letters, role-playing, and dialogues in electronic discussions are
variations on the same design: activities that have explicit directions
for posting in e-mail, newsgroups, and webbed discussion forums. Unlike
less rigidly proscribed online discussions in which students generate
their own topics within a broad framework assigned by their teacher
and respond to each other with substantive comments on their classmates'
postings, these activities are more like short informal essays or non-fiction
articles. These activities work best with 2-to-5 member groups, even
if more than one group discusses the same topic.
Although these activities can be adapted for e-mail discussions by
careful naming of subject lines to identify group members to each other,
I prefer threaded message approaches like the discussion boards in WebBoard
or in course management programs like BlackBoard and WebCT or like newsgroups.
The benefit of the electronic media for these activities (which could
also be done with paper and pen) is the ease with which the writing
can be shared with other readers including the teacher; the opportunity
to read and respond--to reflect and revise before submitting or exchanging
a composition--asynchronously between classes; and the preservation
of the conversation for subsequent publication online.
Letters
The simplest groups are pairs in which each person writes a series
of letters to a partner, but the same process can be expanded for small
groups..
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In the first letter to an individual partner or to a group, students
include such designated elements as
-
a concise summary of the assigned reading or activity (poem,
play, essay, film, lab report, concert, lab or field experiment)
-
an opinion about some aspect of the activity
-
a question or request for another perspective about some aspect
of the activity
-
Each person writes a letter back to one person, answering the question
or offering another perspective or suggesting further areas of investigation
or reflection.
-
Each person writes a follow-up letter specifying how the partner's
response was helpful or synthesizing and commenting on the group's
responses.
The following example comes from first-year composition : Picture Exchange First-Year
Comp.
Role-playing and Dialogues
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In almost any course, students can write in the voice of another
or create a dialogue between two world leaders or scientific theorists
or architects. When students exchange letters in the voice of another,
they can enjoy the activity as a role-playing game at the
same time they attend to genre, context, voice, and audience.
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Having two characters in a work of fiction write letters to each
other engages students in their own work of epistolary fiction.
Students can write as a fictional character to a person present
in the same work or not, for example, students can take on the persona
of John in "The Yellow Wallpaper" writing after his wife's
death to her mother, who replies. Students can write letters to
each other in the voices of the man and the woman in "Home
Burial" or they can continue the dialogue between the characters
each writing a "speech" to the discussion board. They
can carry on fictitious conversations with the authors of their
composition-rhetoric textbooks, one student in the pair taking the
role of the book's author or editor. They can even write a real
letter or e-mail message and send it to the author or editor through
the publisher; however, they might not receive a reply before the
semester ends, if ever, unless you arrange it in advance.
In this example, students wrote a letter to a literary critic whose
work they had read but sent the letter to the class rather than to the
critic. A classmate wrote back in the voice of the critic. With a goal
of introducing students to literary criticism by having them write in
the voice of a critic, this activity led students to read both the works
under discussion (Faulkner's stories) and the critical articles with
care and to write about them more reflectively: Write Like a Fan; Write
Like a Critic.
Discussion Tips
for Interactive Electronic Discussions
Donna Reiss
http://wordsworth2.net/
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