fohr-uhm

When I first heard of forums, I was immediately taken back to middle school when everyone I knew used chat rooms to keep up with one another. Since I don't know much about forums, I researched them and every site I found compared them to chat rooms. Grassroots.org explains forums are, "a public meeting place open for discussion on various topics. An online forum is sometimes called a bulletin board or discussion area.There are many different kinds of forums and the main idea of a forum is to provide a place where people can go, interact, and discuss specific topics. Each forum states a topic and tries to keep the discussion on that topic."

I also found that there are apparently rules to forums. Most of the bigger forum sites generally contain the same overall rules:

• Posts must be relevant to the forum.
• Posts should be respectful of others.
• Posts should not contain SPAM.

I think it's good that forums establish rules so the followers and contributors of the forums can not only find relevant material, but also post on the appropriate forum.

As I have shockingly found, there are forums about anything from how to laundry to the every changing weather. While I do not personally follow any forums, I can see how they could be useful in a classroom. Having a classroom forum within in a classroom website or having a class follow an education-related forum would both be ways of incorporating new information, in an innovative and fun way. However, the one big obstacle I can't seem to get over is that all of the posts on most forums are pure opinion. While some statements may be fact, unless they explicitly list their source, there is no way of know which statements are fact and which ones are pure fiction.

While I do not see forums as apart of my immediate technology use, I do possibly see them on my educational horizon in my classroom. I would, however, have to find a trustworthy forum with valid and true information for my students.