Students are expected to have completed the assigned readings before class and participate in discussions. As stated in the syllabus, you may either fulfill this requirement by writing thoughtful posts in the forum, by speakign up in class, or some combination of both.
The goal of the pre-class forum discussions is to bring up meaningful questions and insights for the presenter, and to prime the class to be thinking critically about the work.
There are no strict format requirements for contributions to the forum. You may do a traditional review if you like, or you may simply highlight what you thought was interesting or pose a few questions. Your contribution can even be to respond to other peoples questions, without having to write your own top-level post first.
I would say try for two paragraphs or so. Maybe ~8-10 sentences, or more if you feel its valuable.
If you are doing a top-level review type post (which tends to be the norm, even though I’d like more back-and-forth discussion), please post the night before class. The reason being that the presenter can get a chance to see what questions/concerns and interests people have about the paper. If none of the responses are in by the morning, then that becomes impossible. You can make other contributions on the day of (responding,follow-ups,etc), but this still must be done before class.
No problem, you may skip 2 discussions without penalty, and I will take only your highest scores.
No, you only need to participate in one paper.
Instead, you should present a few discussion questions / discussion topics for your paper. Each presenter should contribute at least one question.