From the word “research” we can tell that it literally means “re”+”search”, i.e., search repeatedly for an issue or topic that you want to know the truth behind. The first thing a researcher does is to find out a question you want to repeatedly search about, that comes from brainstorming many ideas and problems, and identify a question that you think is worthy of researching. Albert Einstein asked a very simple questions "what is time?" and by looking for answers to it, he developed the theory of relativity. All great researches start from a simple questions.
In many classes, teacher does most of the talking, there’s not much time for students to brainstorm their own questions, using Quora is a great way to help students to build up a habit of asking questions and they could get answers much faster and get more answers than asking in class. Students can not only use Quora to get answers that they want; they could also contribute answers to other people’s questions. So Quora can be used to both solve an unanswered question or start a conversation about an interesting topic. From one question, Quora could gradually build up a community to post and answer questions about anything of their choice to gain collective knowledge. It’s a great tool for a student’s daily researching needs. For example, I'm interested in these topics: cooking, education, publishing, healthy eating, so i could follow these topics on Quora. Under these topics, it shows there are millions of followers.
And when I click one topic, for example, "education", it leads me to the education topic community where many questions about "education" were asked and answered. These questions could promote more thinking and questioning.
I've tried to asked a question"How do I improve efficiency in study life?", I have also requested some experts on this field to reply me. As shown in the picture below, after i pose the question, the page would take me to a window with several experts on this field for me to request their answer, by clicking the "+" sign, it becomes "V” sign, which means the request has been sent to the expert.I could also target my question to specific Quora users; and I can spend credits to get my questions in front of more people. The Quora community would vote on which answers are most helpful.
After I posted a question, within an hour, I got several answers.
The answers that I got is actually quite deep and professional, I'm very satisfied with these answers! Since many other people could also see my questions, if they are interested, they could also follow my question, and see the answers.
Many children are curious and love to ask many questions, but if their questions are not being responded in a timely manner, they would gradually ask less and less, and lost the habit of asking questions. So it's of utmost importance to build an environment that encourages them to ask questions, and get answers. When a child is good at asking questions, they are already on the first step of being a researcher. And the benefit of getting many different answers from different people all over the world would broaden the student's horizon. They would not automatically believe in one teacher's answer, but rather, they could compare different answers, think and process the answers to form their own judgement and opinions. It trains their critical thinking.
In my future classroom, I would design a research lesson for student to do independent research. I will teach them about Quora, and require them to ask and find answers from it. They could write about the process of their research, from a single question to a web of answers from different people and countries. Some answers are from the experts in that field, students could browse the expert's background and get more of their articles to read.Finally, they could synthesise and analyse the answers and information they got, and form their own opinion on this field.
The danger of Quora is that some academic questions might not get very reliable and valid answers from people, students sometimes would feel confused to see so many different views and answers on one topic,particularly some controversial issues. However, that's part of training their own critical thinking, teachers at this time could give them guidance in discernment. They will have to research more about the background of the respondent, etc. The pro is that for some questions, you could get a firsthand data from the person who actually have experienced it, such as "how is the pollution in Beijing? How does it affect your life?" you could possibly get answers from people who actually live there, and provide you their firsthand experience.
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