We have been talking about the difficulties in recognizing the tone of people in text-only formats. One potential problem that sometimes comes out of this is called "flaming" - this is when people get overly involved in a discussion and become angry at each other and use harsh words that they might not use in person. As the article linked below says, "Since text is lacking tonal and visual context, we have a tendency to over-interpret any emotional content that does exist." Sometimes someone writes something as a joke, but people interpret it as more emotionally insulting and respond with higher emotions, which leads to higher emotions, and so on. Thus we have a situation that could become problematic and overly-personal.

When people "flame" they tend to get personal with people they are responding too and it can hurt the communication and learning that is taking place. As moderators, we have to make sure that discussions stay reasonable and not too personal. Without the normal cues we can get from seeing each other, people can be much more hostile in online environments. This can especially be a problem in more controversial topics.

The article linked below suggests that using certain words (such as "shouldn't" or "don't") less and using more emoticons can help reduce flaming. There is also some research that suggests that emoticons decrease flaming. It can also be important to remind people that they should not discuss personal problems in a public forum - they can use email and private messages for that.

This is usually not a large problem for us in the discussion forums. Sometimes people get very angry when discussing the rules of the course, but it usually does not spill over to the discussion forums.

We've had two things come close and both involved what people saw as racism and both times the person was quick to say that wasn't what they had meant.

So, for all of your practical work, you can focus on giving feedback and points to students as in previous weeks (4 points). You can think about what you would do to avoid flaming in the reflection forum (this way you can gain 2 points for an initial post and further two possible points for responses to others).