Section 1: For these questions, consider the ORAL discussions in our class, the times when we are in face-to-face, full-class mode:
I originally started by reading the material to prepare for class, but I found it more effective to listen to the class discussion first. This both helped me pay attention in class, and gave me a framework within which to fit the written material when I did read it.
One of my biggest problems with lectures is wandering off on a tangent. If I've previously read the material and the lecture is convering a bit I already thought about, I can easily lose focus for five minutes, and then miss something and have to catch back up. I have less of a problem when the material is not familiar, although new interesting concepts that cause me to think about them for a while can result in me wandering off on a tangent as well. So avoiding reading ahead doesn't necessarily help me pay attention in class, but it does reduce the problem because I can make a note to follow that tangent when I encounter it again during the reading.
My personal learning style gets excellent results from telecourses and other independent study materials, because I can rewind the bits I wasn't paying sufficient attention to the first time.
I also tend to bring in things that force my attention to switch rapidly (such as a snack or knitting chain mail) because the constant switching of attention means I'm less likely to go off on a long uninterrupted mental tangent. Missing 15 seconds of material is usually fairly easy to catch up, missing 5 minutes means I need several minutes just to reestablish the appropriate context.
On a scale from 1 to 6, probably about a 4. I have a tendency to approach things as a historian, so learning _why_ psychologists had started doing all that research with rats and mazes in the first place was actually seriously cool for me. Later, the material went into more advanced areas that were also less certain and more contested, which wasn't too surprising. I remember from my undergraduate experience with psychology that we tend to be more definite about why things DON'T happen than why they do.
Towards the end I became less involved due to sheer exhaustion. This is my first semester back, and I haven't got the pacing down. The business world has heavy workloads and deadlines as well, but usually you aren't juggling nearly as many of them in parallel.
Our teacher was definitely enthusiastic about the material, which is always a plus.
Again on a scale of 1 to 6, this would be a 5. I had one other course that I enjoyed slightly more, but that was clearly due to the smaller class size (6 students, including me) and the fact that the material matched exactly with one of my existing hobbies, so it was stuff I largely would have been reading anyway.
I felt a bit uncomfortable towards the end disagreeing with the professor's personal favorite theory (socio-constructivism), which didn't match my personal experience very well at all. But I'm used to disagreeing with authority figures. The main thing I liked about this course was that the teacher clearly considered the material worth teaching, so even though I disagreed with their central tenet that made it important to figure out why I disagreed, rather than writing the whole thing off as a bad job as I've done in some other situations. There was clearly something to learn here, one way or the other.
This is definitely a 6. More so than the reading, actually. I had so much reading this semester that it had all started to blur together by the second month. (This is apparently a feature of graduate school I'm going to have to get used to.) That's why I fell back on the lectures as the unifying structure, and tried to fit the readings into the lecture instead of the other way around.
This one's a little unfair since I've been online since I was 12, using a 300 baud modem attached to a commodore 64 to dial up to hobbyist bulletin board systems. I've written five different online discussion systems that I can think of, and participated in more than I could hope to count. My participation in one web-based discussion group evolved into a paying job writing online columns about a subject that I'd learned what little I knew about purely from that online participation and a lot of reading. Altogether, I have now been online for almost 20 years, for entertainment, for work, socially, educationally...
The online discussions were basically like breathing, something I just do and have to make an effort to think about how. The first one I tried to follow the rules of the group and not intrude, using my three posts almost like a quota. The second I didn't quite take seriously enough and in fact forgot to jump into on time. The third I may have overcompensated, answering every interesting thread I came across in my group (and posting well over my three message quota). But I can easly post 20 messages in an afternoon: I type _really_ fast. My record may be over 100, I couldn't tell you...
I was actually in a somewhat odd situation: I didn't want to spook the new arrivals, and didn't want to flood the conversation. This led me to being somewhat tentative in a situation I'm not normally tentative in. How do you be "tentatively serious" about something? In the end I just ignored it and treated it like I would any other online group.
The fact there was such an enormous build-up for it in class was interesting too. So much effort was put into reassurance that the subtext was "I expect all of you to consider this a really odd thing, and I'm going to great lengths to counteract that"... I obviously didn't consider it odd, but I did think the reassurance was a bit over-sold. That contributed to my confusion about how to act on there.
I write a response if I have something to say.
There's really not a whole lot more than that to say. I'm not forcing anybody else to read my messages, so there's not much downside to writing. At the same time, a chronic online problem is the terrible signal to noise ratio, where most messages aren't worth reading. (Google for "Sturgeon's law".)
It's not so much an agree/disagree thing. If I agree completely, there's a tradition online against posting a "me too" message, as being pure noise. (If you're googling for the jargon file, see the entry for "AOL".) But if I disagree without knowing enough to say _why_ I disagree (or present a coherent opposing argument of some kind), then my response would be noise as well.
Since we were all talking about the same articles, I tended to reply to posts were I either got a clear idea from the material, or where I had a real world example I could throw in.
Google, 20 years of experience, and the bookmarks list of doom that allows me to go "I read something about this two and a half years ago", and drop the link in to the conversation. :)
Mostly, my writing is off the top of my head though. Access to the internet to look stuff up just allows me to replace a lot of instances of "thingy" with a URL. :)
I tended to post most towards the end of the thing. We really weren't doing it long enough to get any kind of back-and-forth flow going. But then I'm used to longer timespans for online discussions...
I didn't get much sense of personality at all from the online discussions, but as I said it was different from what I'm used to. No messages stood out, so no personalities stood out...
No.
I take it back, you did have a personality in the online discussion. But then you were grading us, and you're the teacher, so it's kind of expected.
You were also the only one who posted enough in the brief amount of time we had to really have a personality come through...
It's roughly equivalent, yes. But how much participation does an individual student (in a class of what, 30?) really do in a given class discussion? If class had only _met_ three times in person, would I be likely to know who anyboy else in class (other than the teacher) was unless maybe they sat next to me?
While I was in it? Maybe a 4. It was a bit of a "fire and forget" experience, really...
Probably a 2. I've been in engrossing online discussions. This wasn't it. But then with the short turnaround time and the constrained subject matter, I didn't really expect it. It takes me weeks to get to know an online group, and that's with the same people posting consistently. (And yes, they can be very different online than they superficially appear in person. But then there aren't that many people I really spend weeks getting to know in person, either. Being in the same room as somebody three hours a week for class doesn't count.)
Probably a 5. It forced me to read the material a little more deeply, since there was less chance of picking things up from the context of the discussion. Also, I COULD stop in the middle and look something up in the readings, which you usually can't do speaking to somebody...
RANK PERCENTAGE 1____ a) assigned readings 35__ 2____ b) instructor and student ORAL discussion in class 30__ 4____ c) written discussion (on BlackBoard) 15__ 5____ d) after class reading of written discussion 5___ 3____ e) tests and learning project 15__