8.  Troubleshooting

Once the IEDP multi-class network is underway during a semester, questions and problems are bound to arise, as they do with any educational project. In most cases these problems actually are teaching and learning opportunities related to a general lack of understanding about deliberation, dialogic literacy, writing for a real audience, writing in an Internet environment, and understanding the complexity of skilled rhetorical practice.

Common difficulties:

1. Students do not receive responses to their posts.
2. Students post often but there is little interaction or conversation. Their Internet conversation does not "deepen."
3. A student sends or receives a flame.
4. The forum conversation drifts out of the public realm or toward trivial content.
5. An instructor cannot find a partner for a face-to-face conference.
6. As the face-to-face conference date approaches, students present reasons for their not being able to attend.
7. Students do not mix with students at other institutions during at the face-to-face conference.

Some solutions to these common difficulties:

1. Students do not receive a response to their posts.

Nothing is more disappointing to students in the IEDP than not receiving responses or "uptake" to their posts. The reasons for not receiving responses are many and complex. Sometimes these reasons have little to do with the quality of the students’ posts. Well written posts and poorly written posts may be ignored equally.

Here are some strategies to cope with this problem:

· Post once or twice more on the same topic but with different content and different appeals to the audience.

· Alter the subject line to make the topic more appealing or accessible. Be inventive!

· Wait while moving on. Join another thread of interest, but keep an eye on the original posts. As new students join the forums throughout the semester, these new readers may take up the topic.

· Try again later. After participating in a different thread, a loose community may form. This now-familiar community of readers may be receptive to a new topic raised by one of their members.

· For a related assignment, the class might study the issues that are ignored in the forum and try to understand why these are not taken up by other participants. They may also find out how these same issues are ignored or attended to in the culture at large, when and why these become worthy of the public’s attention, and explore other matters of the public deliberative process.

2. Students post often but there is little interaction or conversation. Their Internet conversation does not "deepen."

IEDP conversations usually start with students’ stating their opinions on a wide range of issues of concern to them. Then students take up one or two issues presented in such statements and add their own insights and information. Ideally, the give-and-take of response from a diversity of participants helps students to see and understand new ideas and information as well as helping them to hear how well their own statements are received by a diverse public.

Sometimes, however, students do not know what to write after they have stated their own opinion and read the opinions of others. (In addition, some students may raise interesting questions but do not know what to do with the responses they receive.) The lack of good uptake--uptake that helps to deepen the conversation--is a problem in IEDP forums. It is prevalent enough to warrant a look at habits that exacerbate this problem and then consider a few solutions.

Habits that exacerbate the lack of conversation.

· "Hit and run" or "drive-by" posting to a specific forum or topic and not remaining in the forum to read the responses and give uptake.

· Responding with simple agreement or disagreement but insufficient explanation (including not naming the person and idea to which the response is being given).

· Responding by repeating the statements and explanations of other posters.

· Responding to one of the first posts in a thread rather than reading the whole thread and then responding.

· Writing with the aim of ending the conversation rather than continuing it.

Strategies to encourage interaction and deepening of the conversation:

          a. Teach response strategies other than statements of opinion. These strategies include:

· adding new and specific evidence to the topic, including personal stories and experiences, examples, statistics, expert testimony, material from experts’ research, asking questions about the topic, etc.,

· sharing one’s own puzzlement and confusion about the topic,

· restating others’ posters’ positions and a requesting clarification,

· restating others’ positions followed by analysis or questions,

· taking up an alternate stance and offering plenty of reasons of support,

· uncovering underlying assumptions,

· watching for, explaining, or questioning apparent consensus among posters,

· asking for ways to take action.

b. Require that students stay on a topic for at least two to three posts. (No "hit and run.").

c. Encourage students to remain open to an unexpected change of mind and to respect the good reasons and concerns of everyone in the forum--especially those with whom they disagree. Encourage--better yet, require--students to post these moments of respect and changes of mind (even changes on small points of discussion).

d. Help students develop a response routine that includes a thread analysis before the writing of a post. The analysis might include a summary of what has been said so far, what needs to be added to the conversation, where the conversation should go, and how the student’s post intends to help get the conversation to that point.

e. Help students develop a posting format that includes (a) to whom they are responding; (b) to which idea they are responding; (c) a preview of what they are adding to the conversation; (d) a clear (if brief) explanation of the new ideas, evidence or material; (e) a closing invitation for specific content in response.

3. A student sends or receives a flame.

Listservs, bulletin boards, chat rooms, and similar venues are sometimes prone to inflammatory discourse. This phenomenon is widely noted and seems to have to do with the speed and impromptu nature of the interchange, as well as with the lack of face-to-face contact with one’s audience. In the IEDP, however, flaming is a rare occurrence, perhaps because of the educational (surveillance) venue and the restraining effect of the face-to-face conference. Nevertheless, flaming is extremely disruptive to the forum when it occurs and very hurtful to the recipient(s).

A good way to deal with flames is in a preventative manner.

· Preview with students the inflammatory tendency of Internet conversation. Help them to anticipate the kind of posts which prompt flames and practice alternative ways of writing strong messages.

· Practice non-inflammatory ways of responding to flame-provoking messages (including ignoring the message).

· Since some flames arise in response to posts that are written in a hurried, thoughtless or "off-the-top-of the-head" manner, help students develop a response routine that includes (a) reading the entire thread before responding, (b) revising one’s post to eliminate all personal attacks and all attacks on popularly stereotyped groups or cultures, and (c) sharing an aggressive or provocative post with classmates to see if it is flame-provoking (and revising it as needed).

· Encourage all students to be good citizens in their forums and to be helpful in managing a response to a flame and restoring the conversation to a more productive mode of discourse.

· State as IEDP policy that in most cases the author of a post which provokes a flame is held as responsible as is the author of the flame for the anger, hurt feelings, and disruptive discourse which may follow the flame.

4. The forum conversation drifts out of the public realm or toward trivial content.

The central activity of the IEDP forums is for students to raise and discuss social and political issues of concern to a public. The forums are at their most vibrant when students raise issues in the public realm in which they are personally engaged in some manner. In some instances, however, personal engagement may prompt discourse that drifts out of the public realm, or the conversation on a particular topic may drift toward trivial matters. While students sometimes may feel fully engaged in such non-public or trivial discourse, they have drifted away from the central activity of IEDP participation. Helping students keep topics within the public realm and helping them identify public issues within topics (especially among those topics that start as personal complaints) are two important teaching and learning opportunities in the IEDP.

Instructors can ask students to check that their topics have public qualities, such as:

· The issue or problem affects many people and/or groups in an adverse or problematic way

· The interpretation, meaning, value, or import of the topic is widely debated

· A personal issue, problem or topic is raised, and the author asks questions about the range or nature of problem. (How many others in the forum are affected? What is their experience with the topic? What do they see as the nature of the problem?)

· Actions, changes, new rules or laws are being proposed that may affect many people or society, and a wide public should be aware of the changes.

5. An instructor cannot find a partner for a face-to-face conference.

To locate faculty of other classes or at near-by institutions to participate, IEDP faculty have found that if they can get out the word about the IEDP locally and regionally, interested instructors sometimes step forward. IEDP faculty have success by posting such a "call for participation" on professional and institutional listservs.

If a face-to-face regional meeting is not possible, IEDP faculty may be able to work with their technology centers to arrange for a telecommunications conference with a participating class at another location. One IEDP faculty participant and her students created a short video-taped class interview which was then viewed by other participating classes. All such creative uses of electronic technologies are welcome in the IEDP.

6. As the face-to-face conference date approaches, students present reasons for their not being able to attend.

The face-to-face conference is a significant part of the total IEDP experience. It extends IEDP activities, it improves students’ posts, and it helps bring the project to closure. Also, students are usually interested and excited to meet the students with whom they have been communicating. Last minute cancellations are disappointing for students who have made an effort to attend. At the same time, instructors should remember that last minute emergencies do arise and such a face-to-face meeting with "strangers" can also be anxiety -provoking.

For these reasons, instructors must anticipate ways to actively help students commit to and plan for the face-to-face conference.

· Students should be notified from the first day of the class that conference attendance is part of the project, and the dates of the conference should be in the syllabus.

· Students should be urged well ahead of time to adjust their schedules and to notify instructors of other classes about their absence on that day. The IEDP instructor may need to write a note in support of this request. Also, IEDP instructors may need to seek permission from administrators in order to have students released from other classes to attend the conference.

· Last minute cancellations should have significant consequences for the student.

· Instructors can avoid making the face-to-face conference a mere add-on to the project by having students collaborate with students at the other regional institutions in the creation of a project for presentation at the conference. Attendance and presentation at the conference is, then, the final step in the project

· Students can build their commitment to the conference if they help to plan the activities and agenda of the conference.

7. Students do not mix with students at other institutions during at the face-to-face conference.

Formal and informal interaction among students from different institutions is a crucial activity of the face-to-face conference. In keeping with the complex experiences of the project, students should have the opportunity to deliberate together, to make presentations to each other, and to interact in a more personal way, too. Instructors should be aware that each of these interactions is anxiety provoking for most people, and even more so among relative strangers. Therefore, instructors should plan to help facilitate these interactions.

These activities have helped to promote conference interactions:

· Cross-institutional collaborative presentations (papers, panels, poster sessions, etc.).

· Post-presentation questions sessions and discussion.

· A pre-conference selection of students to interview at the conference.

· Informal "getting-acquainted" activities at the start of the conference.

· Round table, cross-institutional discussions at the conference.

· Cross-institutional seating at lunch or break-time.

· Follow-up discussions and assignments in the days following the conference.

Contents ||| Introduction ||| Goals ||| FAQs ||| Student Experiences ||| Assignments ||| Syllabuses ||| Research ||| Troubleshooting