Making conferencing work - Ben Plumpton (OU)

2. Why do courses use online conferencing?

• Helps distance learners stay motivated and understand that other students are often struggling with the same issues as you
• Obliges students to work together online - increasingly mirrors the workplace
• Group working tends to promote deeper understanding and better critical thinking

3. What's in it for me?

• You get support when you need it (in exchange for giving support to others);
• You have a richer vein of experience to draw on, because you can pool examples,
  references etc;
• Very often a group can produce better work than an individual. One person might put
  forward a thought or idea, often not completely formed or finished, someone else
  picks up on it and takes it forward, that sparks off more ideas in others, and between
  them the group creates something much better than any could have done on their own;
• Learning by 'talking' is more powerful for most people than learning by reading - you
  think about things more deeply, and are likely to remember things better;
• The best way to check your own understanding is to explain it to others. Explaining
  things for your fellow students is good practice for the kind of explanations you'll
  probably have to do in assignments.

4. What is an effective conference like? How can you tell whether your conference is working well?

• Everyone participates, and everyone feels confident they will be 'listened to';
• It is a supportive community, because people have come to trust each other, and 'look out for' each other whilst respecting differences;
• The group has typically worked through shared experience and/or fought shared 'enemies' (such as software problems!);
• Everyone facilitates sometimes - taking some responsibility for discussions and activities, and for encouraging and helping others;
• Everyone takes initiative sometimes - asking questions and starting discussions, not being passive and waiting to be told what to do;
• Arguments happen - people feel safe enough to challenge and disagree, which helps everyone to think and learn;
• Everyone writes carefully, putting their points clearly and constructively, and the structure of the discussions is obvious and easy to follow;
• People trust others to respect their words, to put a good interpretation on them and not 'steal' or misquote them.

5. What can I do to help make my conference 'work'?

• Get involved and make a commitment. This means contributing regularly, putting some time and effort. If you can't be very active, let people know.
• Help people get to know you. People need to feel they can trust each other to be able to 'risk' putting forward ideas.
• Construct your messages well
• Use threading properly
• Be clear what the point you are making is
• Give reasons for your opinions
• Invite responses to your messages e.g. "Do you agree with me here?"
• Take some responsibility - e.g. help keep things going, start discussions without being told to, watch out for people being ignored and help them.

6. What sorts of things to conferences do?

• Social conversation - a bit of social conversation helps the group to work better
• Getting and giving help
• Group work and projects - needs participants to have a feeling of shared responsibility
• Discussion - two main benefits:
• by pooling everyone's expertise & knowledge you end up with a much better understanding of a subject.
• by articulating our ideas, challenging other people's views and being challenged we modify and refine our own views.

How does a discussion work?

• Typically you start with a discussion question or topic, posed by a tutor or perhaps by one of the group.
• Generally one or more people will offer their views on the question. If it stops there, that is not a discussion, just a list of opinions. Everyone needs to take responsibility for moving on.
• The way to move on is to draw each other out, by asking questions like "What evidence is there that...." or "Why do you think that..... " or "What do you mean by....".
• The next thing is to find areas of agreement or disagreement, so you'd be saying things like "I agree/disagree about ..... because......" or "But what if ....." or "On the other hand ...... because....". Giving reasons is important - in academic discussion you generally need to back up your view using evidence, references or examples, rather than making assertions. Don't be too defensive about your opinions if people disagree - the discussion is not a competition to be the most 'right', it is a co-operative effort to improve everyone's understanding. And it's OK to change your mind once you hear other arguments! 
• Aim to build on what other people have said, to separate opinion from fact and to look for areas the group has not covered. Try to look at an issue from multiple angles e.g. you might think about 'who what why when where', or advantages and disadvantages of suggestions, or problems and barriers.

As the discussion progresses, especially if it is lively and interesting, it can get hard to keep
track of and remember where you are going. There starts to be a need for someone to make
sense of it all. Sometimes your tutor or conference moderator will take on that role, but it is
something that everyone can start to do, as part of 'taking responsibility'. The sort of things
that are useful are:

• Summarising - bringing all the important points from a discussion together into a concluding overview. A good summary will highlight decisions and areas of agreement, and acknowledge individual contributions (e.g. "Jo said ..... and Jill made the point that ...."), but without becoming an enormously long and detailed list. 
• Refocusing - pulling the discussion back if it gets too far off-topic e.g. "We seem to have strayed from the point here..."
• Weaving - pulling together threads and ideas, looking for patterns, linking the discussion into the course materials and beyond, identifying holes, opening up new avenues and moving on. Weaving goes beyond summarising, and a dynamic discussion may need several 'weaves' as it goes along. Imagine all the threads of the conference being brought together as coloured strands of wool and woven into a pattern, perhaps including some gold and silver strands from outside. Some examples of weaving comments might be: "We've looked at ..... and ....., but there's the whole issue of ..... which fits in .....", or "When we talked about ..... we thought that ..... but I've just seen an article which says ..... How can we incorporate .....", or "What if we took the idea of ..... and applied it to .....".

The experience of participating in a conference that is really 'constructing knowledge' through
discussion can be amazing. You feel a greater ownership of the conference, which leads to
greater commitment, which leads us to where we began in section 5, with the importance of
getting involved and playing an active part in your conference.

7. Handling particular problems

a) "I don't know what to say!"

Here are some suggestions to get you started with contributing to a conference: 

• Look for other people's messages that you agree with, and say so, perhaps adding your own examples;
• Look for messages that gave you ideas you hadn’t thought of, or that set you thinking about something, and let them know;
• Ask a question about something you don't fully understand, and hopefully someone will help you out. Don't worry about asking 'silly' questions, there will probably be several other people with the same worry, and you'll have done them a favour by asking;
• If someone asks a question you wanted to ask, help them feel less silly by saying you'd like to know the answer too;
• If someone asks something you think you know a bit about, answer it. The very best way to check you know something is to try and explain it to someone else!
• If someone asks a question that you can't help with, but no-one seems to be answering, you can at least offer your sympathy and maybe suggest other sources of help.

Writing your first messages may seem awkward, but if you keep on doing it, conferencing
will quickly come to feel quite natural. 

b) "Am I saying too much?"

Probably not. The people who worry about this are usually the very people who hold a
conference together! There is no time pressure as there might be in a face-to-face discussion,
so even if one person says a lot, there is still 'space' for everyone else. Don't worry unless:

• over half the messages are from you, and
• your messages are mainly offering your opinions rather than engaging in dialogue with others.

If someone is a bit overwhelming, other people can think 'Oh they'll answer that, I won't
bother trying', and lose interest. If you think this is happening, then maybe you could hold
back a bit, e.g.:

• Encourage other people to participate, e.g. by tactfully emailing them to suggest something you think they could contribute;
• If you see a question you think you could answer, wait another day and see if someone else answers it;
• Show you welcome response to your messages, e.g. "What do other people think?"; Ask for help in the conference with something you are less confident about, so people can see you don't know everything.

c) "Not everyone is participating"

• Do what you can to encourage your other group members to join in, e.g. by private email, and find out when they expect to participate, or whether they have decided not to. Accept their reasons and apologies with good grace. It's best not to use guilt-tripping ("You are letting us down"), it rarely works!
• Is there anything you can be getting on with while you are waiting for a response?
• Consider whether you can arrange the group work so that people who are behind can do some of the later tasks.
• If some group members don't participate and don't respond to enquiries, accept that you'll have to manage without them, and don't waste time or emotional energy worrying or waiting for them. You shouldn’t compromise your ability to keep to your schedule and complete your work on time.
• Try discussing the activity in such an exciting way that the others will be drawn in to participating anyway - the chances are that they are reading the discussions.
• Try to be sensitive to others who may be trying to catch up with an activity that is already half-completed - it's not easy for them to join in an established group, so offer what support you can.

The good side of this is that by participating you will learn a lot more and probably do better
in your course assessment than people who don't. 

d) "I've got behind and there's too much to read"

If you don't have time to read all the messages, don't try! Use the message subjects and
senders to decide which to read. Read any introductory messages explaining what the
conference is about and telling you what the group is working on (generally these will
be from the tutor or moderator);

• Don't worry too much about discussions or activities which have finished. Maybe read any obvious concluding or summarising messages, but concentrate on the current activities;
• Send a short message announcing your presence and apologising for the delay;
• Just read messages for a little while, so you get the feel of the conference and understand what's going on;
• If you're not quite sure what has been discussed already, acknowledge this in your messages e.g. "Apologies if you've already covered this, but ...."

e) "Nobody is saying anything!"

A conference can be quite a fragile thing. If no-one says anything for a while, it becomes
harder and harder to break the silence, and no-one feels like being the first to contribute.
There can be a downward spiral until the conference becomes completely dormant. Someone
needs to be brave and break the spiral as soon as they realise what is happening. Here are
some suggestions for things you can do at this point:

• Ask a question that prompts a response, e.g. "Can anyone explain the bit where it says...";
• Respond if anyone else tries to break the silence; 
• Conspire with someone else to get an argument going - take sides on an issue and debate it vigorously, with appeals to the rest of the group to join each 'side';
• Start a discussion on something crucial to the course, e.g. how to tackle the next assignment, or prepare for an exam. 

8. Conclusion

In summary, to get the most out of conferencing on your course, you need to participate fully.
This will take time and effort but it's worth it! A group that helps and supports each other,
brings a variety of thoughts, examples and perspectives together, and challenges and builds on
each other's ideas, will make a big difference to your enjoyment and understanding of the
course, and hopefully also to your achievement in the course. The key things to remember are
to:

• Get involved and make a commitment;
• Help people get to know you;
• Construct your messages well, and
• Take some responsibility.

You can't do this theoretically, the only way to do it is to have a go, make mistakes and enjoy
yourself in the process. In the end, the more you put in, the more you will get out.