Summary
Moodle offers several options for the student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction. When deciding which social activities to use, consider the level of structure and the level of student-to-student/student-to-teacher interaction you want. For example, chats and wikis are naturally unstructured with a lot of opportunities for the student-to-student interaction. These are good ways of relinquishing some control of the class to students. A forum offers more structure, because entries are segregated to topics. It can be moderated by the teacher, making it even more structured.
You may want to introduce a chat and/or forum at the beginning of a course to build esprit de corps among several students and then move on to a collaborative wiki (such as a group writing project).
In the next chapter, we will see how to encourage collaboration among students using wikis and glossaries. We will learn how to use collaboration as an instructional strategy, develop a glossary and a wiki, and...
