iEARN
4. Prepare


Preparing students for online communication
Preparing students for international collaboration
  Suggestions for Posting on Online Forums

 

 

Sample of a thoughtful response to what might be seen as an inappropriate message in some contexts.

A male student sent a picture of himself sitting in a computer lab and wrote:

Check me out aren't I a hottie.

Response:
Dear R.. and T..

I am also a U.S. student. I am from New York City. Thank you for your photos. But I'm afraid that the message that came with your photos "Check me out aren't I a hottie" and "you're so sexy" weren't very appropriate. Let me explain. Last summer I attended the annual iEARN conference held in Japan. As part of the Youth Summit, I spent a week with youth from over 40 countries. What I learned from that week was that not only were we very similar, but also that we were very different as we all came from different cultures. The biggest lesson that I was taught was to be very careful in what I say and how I say it. Because something that would be perfectly fine to say with my peers in New York could offend a youth from one of the 40 countries who grew up in a different culture and thus have a different perception of what is appropriate to say and what is not and which words are offensive and which are not.

I would like to pass this lesson on to you. When you post on the iEARN forums, you are posting to a global community with youth from a myriad of cultures. Thus, you must be careful with your word choices to ensure that they will not offend anyone. Words like "hottie," "cutie," "sexy" etc. all have sexual nuances and thus are liable to offend. In some cultures, to say words with such sexual connotations is very offensive. Furthermore, by uttering such words, you portray yourself in a very bad light. And, as you're a U.S. student, it also reflects badly on the U.S.

The last consequence of such words is that participation in the iEARN forums would suffer. Because if you are a parent of a child, would you want your child to be exposed to such indecent language? No. As a parent, you would naturally not allow your child to log onto the iEARN forums. Which means one less child to post and reply to messages.

Thus, as you see, it is very important to ensure that what you say cannot be taken the wrong way and offend anyone. Of course, that is not always possible, but we must still try. I do not mean to attack either one of you as I realize that you did not write those words in order to offend anyone. I, myself, did not learn the importance of choosing words with precision until I was sixteen, when it was taught to me by History teacher. And I did not realize how important that lesson was until the iEARN 2003 conference.

Respectfully,
Dasha, USA

Suggestions for Posting on Online Forums

Pedagogy of Writing E-mail Messages

E-mail is a tool that teachers and students use to share information with each other. The writing process is most successful when they write from the deep knowledge of their own rich cultural, community and school learning experiences. The writing process includes:

  • Conversations taking place among the whole class, in small groups, or in individual teacher or student peer conferences about the experiences they wish to share online. Discussing a topic before putting it in print facilitates clarification of ideas and the building of rich descriptive words in a collaborative social dialogue before the actual writing takes place.

  • The first draft of the e-mail message focuses on content ideas and then on organization of ideas, on sentence syntax, and on spelling. The first draft can be typed on the computer using a word processing program.

  • The initial draft will then be shared with someone else through writing conferences with student peers and/or teachers. The author or another person can read the draft aloud with the purpose of "hearing" how the text reads. The conferencing process is an important time for clarifying meanings and talking together about the ways words could make the text more descriptive. When sending e-mails, it is critically important to understand that you are sending language across diverse cultural contexts and without the prior opportunity to know one another face-to-face. Careful attention needs to be given to define vocabulary indigenous to a culture or context.

The following comes from the Teaching.com website. Although it refers to replying to e-mail, the affirmative behaviors it contains are applicable to forum postings.

Mailing List Etiquette

The following tips can help you communicate with your IECC (Intercultural Email Classroom Connections) partner(s) in ways that increase civility, dignity and the psychological sense of community.

  • Always respond to those who send messages to you, even if you only have time to write a brief "thanks for the e-mail" response.
  • Try to use the name of the person to whom you are writing with frequency, as a sign so that your partner knows that you are writing to her/him in particular. It makes comments seem more personal.
  • Try to use words and language that are familiar to your partner, as a sign that both of you are on equal footing. If you use language that is over their head or that is unfamiliar, it may make your partner feel "inadequate."
  • Try to listen for and talk about common experiences you may share with your partner. This will help establish a common ground to connect you.
  • Try to paraphrase the comments of your partners and to refer to things they said earlier. This helps your partner know that you are really listening to them.
  • Try to ask your partner for their help, advice, opinion, or thoughts. These are signs that you respect something about your partner. It can signal to your partner that you took the time to think about them in particular as being able to contribute something valuable to you.
  • Acknowledge the things that your partner said that were especially good, helpful or valuable in some way, as a signal that he or she is appreciated.
  • Try occasionally to use the particular words or ideas that your partner used first (giving them credit for saying them of course) as a sign that they are truly making a difference. When you tell them that something they said made you think, then they know that you listened carefully enough to what they had to say to relate it to your own life.
  • Try to name the emotions you are feeling as you read what your partner wrote. This can help them understand the immediate impact of what they had to say.
  • Try to be open about your feelings with your e-mail partner. When you are open it lets them trust you more and feel that you have a stronger link with each other.
- Adapted from tips by Craig Rice, co-founder of IECC.


Communicating on Online Forums

  • Try to describe the essence of your message in the subject line. And if you are responding to a message, do not change the subject line.

  • Try to be as brief as possible in your message and write the most important things in the first paragraph. You may be writing in a language that is not the native language of those reading your message. So it is very helpful for others to be able to get a sense of your message in the first few sentences if possible.

  • Some subscribers to the forums use dial-up access and pay for telephone time (and sometimes for kilobytes too). For them, huge files mean huge telephone bills. Sometimes they can't even get messages if they are too big. In addition, don't quote the whole message that you are responding to, quote only pieces that you comment on. Otherwise, if several people respond to a message, and include it and previous messages in a quote, messages become huge.

  • Limit the number of attachments you post on the forums. They can be too big for those who pay for dial-up access. In addition, they most often do not translate over the many systems across iEARN and many arrive as garbage.

  • Try to configure your mailing software so that it sends out only plain text and no attachments of encoded word documents and html files. (e.g. Microsoft Outlook Express by default is set so that it sends out not only plain text, but also an encoded word version of the same text or an html version, that doubles the size of messages.) If you want to share with all subscribers something that is big but valuable (a Word document, a jpeg picture etc.) just send a note to the forum and ask people if they want to get it by e-mail, then email it to them individually. Or, place your document on the web for everybody to see.
  • Do not post chain letters or any commercial advertisements to the forums.

Jay Holmes of the American Museum of Natural History and a facilitator for the YouthCaN project gave the following advice to create postings that will elicit responses:

There are many people who have trouble getting responses on the forum. These are a few suggestions that I can make:

  • Always have a subject line or title to your message that explains what your message is about, like water pollution, endangered species, recycling, etc.
  • Ask your readers one or two specific, easy questions that they can answer.
  • Read other postings in the forum and respond to them. Answer their questions and then ask them a question or suggest that they read your messages in the forum. Give them the exact subject line of your message so they can find it in the forum. Remember, dialog goes both ways, to get answers you have to give answers and you have to lead people into a dialog with questions and responses.

 

 


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