How teachers and tutors use forum posts?

[Stephen Tashi]

I haven't taken a course in years, so I don't know how modern teachers and tutors use the internet. It occurs to me that one interesting exercise would be to have a student ask a question on various forums, collect the posted answers and then have the student or the class critique them. Anyone know if that's actually done?

 

[jim mcnamara]

I do see the same programming based questions, verbatim, on several different forums. And they often appear to be homework to me. My take is that in giving homework help we can wreck the learning part for students.

Some just want a handout.

 

[Stephen Tashi]

Well, I'm wondering if any teachers use forum posts in a public manner as instructional material. It's clear that students use them privately.

 

[jtbell]

I used to hang out a lot on Usenet newsgroups, when they were more popular and there were fewer Web-based forums. Textbooks for "Internet literacy" classes often had chapters about using newsgroups. Certain groups regularly received small "floods" of posts with similar questions, obviously from the same class assignment. Homework spam.

 

[Curious3141]

I do see the same programming based questions, verbatim, on several different forums. And they often appear to be homework to me. My take is that in giving homework help we can wreck the learning part for students.

Some just want a handout.

Which is why HW help is more satisfying here (where there are no handouts, as per forum policy) than, say, Yahoo Answers. (And that's why I stopped "helping" on YA - because it's not actually help to spoonfeed them).