Electronic Communication Reflection
...ance all have an effect on the way I behave or respond. Whereas, these factors were all eliminated when using the online forum and I concentrated fully on my topic of discussion. The whole forum was a group process where every person involved had to throw in some of their time, effort and ideas into making the entire online discussion worthwhile. Generally, from what I perceived, not everyone was consistent with their postings. This included me. This does not, however, imply that learning was impaired or that the online learning experience was not fruitful. Every contribution made only added to the learning experience. There are a good number of reasons as to why I, or almost anyone for that matter, could not contribute consistently. That is, ‘two postings at least once a week’ as stated in the assignment handout. Firstly, the limited time that we all had was a major constraint. Of course, having the freedom to choose what time of day or night we wanted to contribute had its advantages as I stated earlier. But the eight or so weeks we had to contribute was just not enough to grasp all that was on offer by online-learning. It also seemed impossible to read and respond to each and every posting as there were simply too many (177 postings in the IT Momentum thread alone). For that reason, I chose to only respond to discussion ideas which caught my interest and/or a topic which had some real meaning behind it. For example, I chose to contribute on the issue of ‘Cyber Crime’ rather than ‘Telecoms New Video-Conferencing’. This was simply a matter of preference and no bias intended towards video-conferencing or Telecom. I believe I took a passive as well as an active approach towards contributing to the whole group process. Initially, I was quite active, starting a few ideas of my own. After doing considerable research on my topics, I posted my ideas and saw it generate quite a few responses. For example, my posting on ‘Harness IT’. As time went by and people were running out of things to talk about, I developed a more passive approach, responding to people’s ideas and opinions rather than generating new messages of my own. Other than time constraints and a slight lack of things to talk about, the entire process was very much worth the while. Also, even though there should have been more postings made by each person, I believe the overall quality of the content of the forum was superb. There was something new to learn from each and every person and their ideas. One reason as to why there were not as many postings as expected, I believe, was because every aspect of the topic in discussion had been covered by someone in one way or the other towards the end that it made it difficult to elaborate more on the matter without relating to someone’s ideas again and again. This was evident in a posting by Sungeeta (IT futures and skill set; 15/04/2003), which I felt, was pointing out the same message as one of my postings (skills, pay cuts and vacancy controversy; 05/04/2003) in different words. Discussion in the ‘IT Momentum’ thread was very rewarding as it enabled me to gain a deeper understanding of IT and how it is integrated with businesses. Most of my postings focused on IT and its use within the business environment as well as matters relating to security. Discussion topics ranged from pay cuts to the ‘hows’ of training staff, from information thefts to firewalls, from IT systems that businesses have used to earn millions to simple human errors that caused their downfall. I think you get the picture! Looking at the expected responses I anticipated and the actual responses that I received, I discovered a few interesting details. Largely, I found that I received the responses I had anticipated. This was so for most of my postings. That is, there were no real surprises. Although, I cannot say that this was true for all of my postings. A closer look at the postings where I had got the responses that I anticipated, I found that I had done a fair bit of researching on the topic before uploading my contribution on BOL. These postings contained interesting facts and figures and/or real life cases which related to the topic of discussion. This theory proves to be correct with a look at my posting titled ‘Harness IT’ (posting number: 1). This finding was in...