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Emily Cribas
CAS 138T
March 19, 2014
Online Deliberation Reflection
I took part in the online deliberation about general education at Penn State. With
three options to choose from, I attempted to create a deliberative exchange for each.
Deliberation is the careful consideration with a view to decision.
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This can be
accomplished through mutual discovery as problem solving.
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As a whole, deliberative
exchanges should deploy the scientific method, and in the end should benefit not only
the individual but also the society.
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Through this forum, I should be able to converse
with others through an exchange of ideas that should promote discussion and
understanding of the subject and potential solutions.
Although my posts didnt generate as much discussion as I would have liked,
when it did, in the instance below I felt it was deliberative.
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The other commenter and I both agreed on the importance of general education classes on
our future career paths, because we are being exposed to different areas of the work
field all the time. We also agreed on putting less emphasis on those who already chose
their major because we believe these classes should be focused on exploration. By
prioritizing our values, we generated a solution that reflected our ideas and came up with
the idea of requiring internship opportunities to help students get better exposure to their
profession. Although our exchange was short, we both brought up points that we hadnt
thought of at the beginning. By bouncing off of each others ideas, we came up with
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bigger and better ones. We explored solutions, qualified them, and left only a set of
valid statements
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to judge from, as German philosopher Jrgen Habeas would have put
it. Through careful consideration of each others opinions, we underwent the open-ended
process of talking described by Benjamin Barber, and explored and created
commonalities through mutual discovery and problem solving.
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For my post on option two, shown above, I critiqued a persons perspective, when
I should have been helping them modify it or change it entirely by showing her my
concerns and ideas. Instead of brainstorming ideas together, they did the brainstorming,
and I criticized. While she had a good idea of starting a college theme idea, I
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immediately told her how inflexible some colleges are and how hard it would be for a
DUS student to follow this.

My post for option three, shown above, was probably the least productive of the
three, and would be described as a disconnected monologue. Now, as I look at the
previous comments, I definitely see a lot of resemblances to what I said. Many had
already voiced my opinions on the efficacy of huge class sizes and how ineffective this
teaching setting is. All I did differently was go into depth. If I had spent more time
reflecting on others ideas instead of immediately relaying my own, then there could have
been a productive exchange.
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Overall, I felt the discussion was moderately productive. By productive, I mean
that there was an exchange of ideas as well as scrutiny of perspectives with the result of a
viable solution. This was true for one post, and I consider my other two posts ineffective.
As a whole, this online RCL discussion definitely had its limitations. Compared to
10-12 people in the group discussion, this forum had hundreds of comments and posts.
This hinders how much time we can spend criticizing each persons perspective, and as a
result, we spread ourselves too thin. With an overflow of ideas, some of them practically
the same, we sacrifice the value in each individual contribution. There is a trade-off
between how much contributions we want and how clear we want the solutions to be. It
becomes a question of quality over quantity. Also, with so many commenters, there
comes a point where we exhaust all the possibilities and lay all the cards on the table, and
after we reach that point, all that results are restatements of what was already said.
Having a face-to-face deliberation gives us all an opportunity to focus solely on
the conversation at hand and allows us to actively process what is being said, and come
up with the most rational solutions based on the connections made during this time. In
contrast, online deliberation is perhaps not as concise or focused.
As for the general education deliberation compared to other online deliberations,
this one again has its challenges. We did not open the forum wide enough to include all
networks of interpretation on the subject like most forums would. By including only
those students enrolled in an honors RCL class, we exclude all other types of Penn State
students with different/more experiences including those in DUS, upperclassmen, and all
others not enrolled in CAS.
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Also, by making this exclusive to Penn State students, alumni that are currently in
a profession or have had years to see the potential benefits (or not) of general education
classes did not have a chance to contribute valuable information and experiences to this
forum. This limits our discussion and may lead to solutions that may not be plausible for
all of those who have a personal stake in the issue.

References
1. "deliberation, n.1." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web. 19
March 2014.
2. Rhetoric & Civic Life. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2013. 88-89. Print.