Reflection on Discussion Forum

Personally, I feel that it is interesting to post our views on OLE and Facebook discussion forum. Some people (like me), prefer writing/typing than speaking, so we are able to express ourselves freely on platforms like these.

Online discussion is very different compared to traditional face-to-face in-class discussion, as in online discussion, each person is allowed to have time to organize their thoughts, and everyone is given a chance to voice their opinion. In traditional discussions however, it is much more difficult to let everyone have a change to give their views due to time constraints, and you don’t really have the time to write down what you want to say in the discussion, so most of the time it is speaking ideas “out of the mind”. In online discussions, we post our views by typing, and as typing is usually much faster than writing it out, we are able to type down what we really want to express and voice our opinion clearly and effectively (ie. No broken English).

I find this online activity meaningful as it allows people to communicate to each other online, and even people who are also shy in voicing out their opinion would give it a try. These conversations can also be saved and archived as they are all on the net, unlike in traditional discussion where people have to take down what other people had said if they wants it (for reasons like their research and etc). Thus, we can refer back to our threads in the discussion forum if someone posted something useful and we want to use it as a reference, or to help us in our research.