Krista R. Poscente; Patrick J. Fahy
Description:
Computer Mediated Conferencing (CMC) provides the opportunity for interaction in distance education courses. Successful asynchronous text-based conferencing overcomes transactional distance (Moore, 1991), permitting student-student as well as instructor-student communication. This interaction is thought to foster the development of an on-line learning community.Strategic initial messages, triggers, in asynchronous text conferencing can lead to rich cognitive discussions. Such initiating messages or triggers have been reported in previous literature, defined either in relation to their effects (number of actual responses received), or their intentions (the writer’s evident purpose of evoking responses by being in some way provocative). In Zhu’s (1996) study, a good student starter usually pointed to a few major discussion themes for a weekly discussion. Fahy (2001) defined “response triggers” as messages that generated large numbers of subsequent postings. Triggers in the Community of Inquiry model are defined more in the latter sense, as messages that are intended by the writer to evoke discussion, whether or not they actually succeed in doing so (Garrison, 2002; Garrison, Anderson, and Archer, 2000; Garrison, Anderson, and Archer, 2001). The characteristics of postings which succeed in triggering responses, as compared with those which fail to do so, was the focus of this inquiry.