In this segment we are going to look at forums and to think about why you might use a forum. They’re traditionally used by people who are interested in a particular topic where they come together to share ideas and knowledge.

Forums have been around for a long time. They were one of the earliest internet tools that were used and have been used since the mid 90s. Sometimes product developers use them to support their product and you might see a forum set up when you’ve bought a camera or something where you can go and find out answers to question you might have.

Others are set up by individuals or groups who have an interest in a particular area and they can be diverse as looking at a quite unusual health issue, how to do particular child rearing exercise.

In the curriculum, in schools they can look at aspects of a subject or a teaching technique, professional development and a myriad of different things. You’ll find forums used everywhere.

One advantage of a forum over a chat or a telephone conversation is that they are asynchronous. That means that the user doesn’t have to be online to answer or to work in the forum at the same time as everyone else. This gives you time to prepare and think about a posting before it actually goes online. Your messages can be short or long and responses to messages can be short or long. Forums can have attachments. Attachments can vary from word docs to links to podcasts, videos, web pages, all sorts of things that can enliven and provide extra information. And virtually anything you can do with an email you can do with a forum tool.

One big advantage is the capacity to see a condensed list of topics before you open up a particular thread which is a series of posts on an area of a forum. These threads can proliferate, they can grow, they can expand and they can develop like a tree around any topic as different people come from widely different points of view to explore a topic. It might start on growing oranges but move to exploring different benefits of different types of oranges, Grandma’s particularly favourite marmalade recipe, right through to how you can clean stains using orange juice and so on and so on.

Forums can be fascinating and they have certainly been widely used right across the Internet.