OUseful Info

Time to "Tangle" OpenLearn Forums and Chat?

One of the key differentiators of OpenLearn, compared to other OER sites, is the provision of a "learning environment" around the open educational content. Several tools are provided to help learners make sense of the materials and also support community formation and social interactions.

For example, the Compendium visual thinking, knowledge mapping, sense making tool (which just doesn't make sense to me! Maybe I'm prejudiced against it because it requires a download...?;-):

Flashmeeting, a small group video conferencing tool, with and IM/chat line, whiteboard and the ability to record meetings and analyse participation within them:

The MSG Instant Messenger*, with it's nifty geo-presence indicator (I don't think you can make chat histories public, though, in a "previous chats about this topic" sort of way?):

(MSG is an open source software app, I think, that runs using Jabber?)

and the OpenLearn forums...

...which don't seem to be working at all well...:

We are having a problem in that the number of people who are using the OpenLearn forums and making postings is rather limited. It is felt that the reasons for this may be:

* there are too many forums [OUseful: YES - and this potentially silos discussions. For example, several units cover overlapping areas (climate change and global warming come to mind, elements of ICT systems do too). One thing discussion is good for is considering multiple points of view; the current forum structure fragments discussion even about the same topic.]

* the forums are often too deeply embedded [OUseful: YES - and where they appear moves around: on the front page, there's a link in the left sidebar, on the unit pages it's in the right; I guess the forum box is always below the scroll, though, which is some sort of consistency!]

* people may not be encouraged to enter the forum [OUseful: YES - but what do you expect? No-one likes to be first to post - many sites seed their forums to give the appearance of activity, like seating diners in the window of a restaurant...]

And of course, it'd take at least 3 clicks? maybe 4? from the front page before you can even see evidence of a forum posting?

What brought OpenLearn comms to mind was a recent TechCrunch post on Tangler (Tangler's Embedded Discussions):

Australian startup Tangler has created a next generation forum product that allows real-time discussions to occur without page refreshes. Their forum product is both synchronous and asynchronous - meaning it competes as much with Meebo (web based chat) as it does with existing forum applications.

Whether or not this is what Tangler does, reconciling "public" chat (i.e. supporting chat rooms as well as p2p chat), "public" Flashmeetings and forum discussions maybe one way of fostering and cross-promoting the OpenLearn communications channels?

At the moment, I'd have to look in several places for discussion about an OpenLearn topic (if such a discussion exists...): the Compendium archive, the Flashmeeting archive and the forums. And maybe a Facebook group.... etc etc.

Maybe finding a way of using forums as a conversation aggregator about a particular topic would be a better way to go?

Posted by ajh59 at August 1, 2007 11:04 AM