1. Jim Flowers, Professor & Director of Online Education Department of Technology Ball State University, Muncie, IN

2. Who here  teaches online students in a class where you are trying to get them to feel free to speak their minds?

3. 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?

4. But when you encourage them to speak their minds  don’t some students tend to close-mindedly generalize their narrow experiences more broadly?

5. 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 hands- on learning”?

6. 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?

7. Wouldn’t it be cool  to have a class forum serve as a tool for expansive thinking?

8. 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?

9. What if I  created a Blackboard forum for Week 3 of a 5-week Seminar where they could only post using interrogatives?

10. “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?”

11. 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?)”?

12. 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?”

13. 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?”

14. 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?”

15. 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?

16. 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?

17. 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 open- mindedness?

18. Do you have any questions?  If you have any comments that are not questions, could I ask you to word them as interrogatives?

19. Jim Flowers Professor & Director of Online Education Department of Technology Ball State University, Muncie, IN http://jcflowers1.iweb.bsu.edu