4.4 Playing with experiences
As well as being playful with words and images, you can also bring your experiences to a forum. While it is a personal decision whether to write about your own experiences on forums, personal anecdotes or reflections on real-world experiences help learning ‘come to life’. This is partly because these materials are full of emotion, feelings, memories and physical responses. They were and are ‘felt’ by the writer and, therefore, are rich and full of meaning.
Just as being playful with words or images can help you ‘read’ or ‘see’ differently, sharing personal experiences can also transform your thinking and understanding of an issue, an idea or a concept. You will look at an example of this in the next activity.
Activity 7 Being playful with experiences
Read the following forum discussion and then answer the questions below.
- How did Andi keep the tone of her posts playful?
- How did Andi make sure she had left her initial post open enough for anyone to come into the conversation, no matter what their experiences?
- What was the impact of bringing these experiences together on the forum on Andi and Amma’s understanding of the issues?
Discussion
Andi keeps her initial posting playful by bringing in some humour, contrasting her mum’s and grandma’s social life with her own and suggesting that they may be luckier than her. Andi ends by throwing in a fairly open question encouraging others to respond, no matter what their own experiences are. Both Andi and Amma broaden their understanding of the issues raised in the article. By sharing experiences, they arrive at a position where they can be more critical of the article through realising that it missed out some important factors such as size and population characteristics.