Jim Flowers, Professor & Director of Online Education
Department of Technology
Ball State University, Muncie, IN
Who here
 teaches
online students in a class
where you are trying to get them
to feel free to speak their minds?
To empower them to learn
and wonder
 shouldn’t
we encourage them to
speak up, and to feel free to draw
conclusions as they see fit?
But when you encourage
them to speak their minds
 don’t
some students tend to
close-mindedly generalize their
narrow experiences more
broadly?
Like me, are you bothered
by a false generalization,
 Like:
“No teacher gets the
support from their principal that
they deserve”; or
 “It is impossible to teach about
technology without using handson learning”?
But how might we encourage
open-mindedness
 without
stifling free and open
discourse and their formulation of
hypotheses?
 Debates? Term Papers?
Readings? Arguing with them?
Wouldn’t it be cool
 to
have a class forum serve as a
tool for expansive thinking?
Instead of writing
declarative sentences,
 how
about if in that one class
forum, only interrogatives are
allowed?
 Might this help them be more
open-minded?
What if I
 created
a Blackboard forum for
Week 3 of a 5-week Seminar
where they could only post using
interrogatives?
“Will You Play a Question
Game?”

“Can you post meaningful
communications relevant to our look at
technology education that contain only
questions? Will this lead to more
expansive thinking?”
Would it help to have an opening post, like:

“Did you notice that the subject line was a question? And
did you see that all of the sentences in this message are
questions? We've said a lot of interesting things about
technology education, career and technical education, our
backgrounds, our schools, our beliefs, and just a little bit
about the literature, but I wonder, would it help to raise
more possibilities if there were a forum like this where
every single sentence had to be in the form of a question?
¶ Could you please also help police this forum (not just
this thread) by pointing out to anyone who posts a
sentence in this forum that is not a question that they've
violated the protocol? ¶ Would you accept my thanks? ¶
Jim (Could I ask you to not count a message's salutation
or signature as a sentence that needs to be in the form of
a question?)”?
Don’t some of that forum’s posts
seem more open-minded:
 “We
want engineers to entertain
questions of ethics, but when
they do that are they engaging in
an engineering activity or in
ethical inquiry?”
Don’t some of that forum’s posts
seem more open-minded:
 “I
know job searches in this tough
economic market can be
frustrating, especially in fields that
tend to have a lot of qualified
applicants, but are there things
you can do to avoid feeling that
frustration and even despair?”
Don’t some of that forum’s posts
seem more open-minded:
 “Aren't
we limiting TE far too
much if we only teach it as a
subset of engineering? Shouldn't
we often ask students to step out
of the role of engineering for a
while and engage in some other
very meaningful learning
activities?”
What are some anecdotal
questions I’m left with?
 How
long will the impact last on
some students who seem to have
asked more questions in their
journals and who have told me
that their co-workers were
starting to get annoyed at all their
interrogatives?
What are some anecdotal
questions I’m left with?
 Why
does the question game
forum seem so difficult for some
students and a breeze for others?
What are some anecdotal
questions I’m left with?
 Shouldn’t
I do some formalized
study here to look at the impact,
both on ratio, quantity and types
of interrogatives elsewhere in the
class, and on measures of openmindedness?
Do you have any questions?
 If
you have any comments that
are not questions, could I ask you
to word them as interrogatives?
Jim Flowers
Professor & Director of Online Education
Department of Technology
Ball State University, Muncie, IN
http://jcflowers1.iweb.bsu.edu