The typical directions for online threaded discussions -- "make one initial post and two replies to others' initial posts" -- actually hinder critical engagement. The common practice of requiring all students to make initial posts invites redundancy and banality; it also starts too many parallel conversations, dispersing the discussion and multiplying the information on-screen needlessly.
Source: Barbara Monroe, 'Fostering Critical Engagement in Online Discussions: The Washington State University Study' (2003 PDF, emphasis mine)
This perfectly crystallizes my repeated frustration with the threaded discussions that are part of my online and hybrid classes at DeVry. There's so much crap, and unlike many of my classmates I'm uncomfortable with replying with some padded equivalent to "me too".
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