Sorry for being silent in this CALMet Session. I would really like to spend more time with the reading, listening and discussion, but this is not possible at the moment.
I wanted to share a quote I found in a recently published book "The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Learning" by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner. I thought this fit nicely with what I think about discussion forums:
"Training often gives people solutions to problems already solved. Collaboration addresses challenges no one has overcome before."
So if we start training having the training goal but not having the ready solution, discussion forum is probably what would bring us to the desired stage.
Another thought that I wanted to share maybe here (as I didn't find yet a better place) - as Pat has already pointed out with VideoAnt example, one should not consider discussion forums as a sequence of retorts or a Q&A session. I would rather think of future discussion forums as a Google Wave and the like. Anybody had experience with that? Rather than trying to build up a course around discussion forum in Moodle, I would love to try building one in Wave (and I believe that it is possible to run Google Wave in Moodle, if you still need an LMS :))
I think Eduard brings up a good point about discussions as discussions. Training can be rather focused, targeted, and narrow, and sometimes this is appropriate to meet necessary constraints. But discussion can expand training into something else--creating knowledge and collaborating toward unique solutions. With discussions, an instructor or trainer gives up a little control, but what is gained is opportunity to go places unplanned.
I am intrigued by Eduard's suggestion about Google Wave. I hope we can collaborate with this tool in the future. Maybe a "course" that is not a course, but a collaboration toward a general goal. I have hoped this session could be a little like that.
I am intrigued by Eduard's suggestion about Google Wave. I hope we can collaborate with this tool in the future. Maybe a "course" that is not a course, but a collaboration toward a general goal. I have hoped this session could be a little like that.