I agree with Karen’s definition but I would add that I find Forum topics can be very broad–which leads to the meandering discussions that Karen alludes to in her post. Are you thinking of having forums used more by ePortfolio classes that all ePortfolio students can join–not just students in one class?
Interesting idea regarding an open student discussion, Tanya. I think we’re open to all suggestions right now. What would you like to see included in an eportfolio? What do you think your students would like?
An open forum can be a good idea if we’re looking for suggestions from students, but that will also mean we need moderators to keep topics in check. It easy to lose track of a conversation, the topic starts in one direction and ends up in another direction while losing slight of was originally discuss.
I guess to help answer the original question of this post, I copy & pasted this from a wiki:
“An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.[1] They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user and/or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes visible.
Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; e.g. A single conversation is called a ‘thread’.
A forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure: a forum can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum’s topic, each new discussion started is called a thread, and can be replied to by as many people as wish to.
Depending on the forum set-up, users can be anonymous or have to register with the forum and then subsequently log in in order to post messages. Usually you do not have to log in to read existing messages.”
