'Privacy' mode and 'Anonymous' mode

Access to others' posts influences what a student will post. This works well when we want students to interact with each other. However, this may introduce bias into students' judgements. It also happens that one student may provide a 'dominant' view that will be easily followed by others, thereby limiting creativity and cornering the discussion.

Posts in a thread marked as 'Privacy Mode' will be invisible. Thus, students posting in the thread won't see other students' posts until we take some action. That will allow us, for instance, to compile all students' posts and provide a general summary, or select the most insightful posts, after everybody has participated, and only then make all posts visible (if we want to).

Combined with an 'Anonymous mode', where names and identities are undisclosed, this will reduce bias in students' judgements accordint to gender, age, race, ethnicity, status, degree of relationship, etc. An 'anonymous mode' also helps us limit our own biases.