[p2pu-dev] Ways of designing a discussion forum

[Alison Jean Cole]

Hey Stian,

I marked this thread for replying and it got buried. I think this is a very
important design discussion and points to two things, the course/group's
front page and various ways to view tasks.

Now that some changes have been made and some tasks get prominence, I wonder
what further design changes we can make improve the various uses of the task
feature.

ALISON
new.p2pu.org/en/alison/ <http://p2pu.org/users/alison>





On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 5:46 PM, Stian Håklev <shaklev at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yeah, I pushed hard for the full description to be the key thing you see
> when you visit a course at least before it's running. I really wanted people
> who visited CSCL intro and were curious to quickly get a sense of what was
> planned etc, not get confused by the activity stream. I think part of the
> reason this wasn't implemented was the confusion between different
> categories, and desire to make it very flexible for course organizers (Ie.
> maybe they want it to be open for signup throughout the entire course
> period, etc)...
>
> I also like that the discussion forum takes the whole screen... There is a
> huge amount of "chrome" on P2PU currently, which is great for navigating
> around, taking a look at this and that, etc, but when I get down into a
> really deep discussion, I want to really focus on that, and get as much
> space as possible to see the other comments, write my comment etc.
>
> Stian
>
>
> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 08:36, Jessy Kate Schingler <jessy at jessykate.com>wrote:
>
>> very awesome. i totally agree with this general approach of having
>> essentially a few different pivots on the same data, depending on what the
>> user is looking for. one thing which knowledge commons has that would be
>> useful for lernanta is more of a "homepage" for a course as distinct from
>> the activity within a course. this is sort of like the distinction between
>> the lernanta homepage when you're logged in and when you're not.
>>
>> the ability to highlight actions/deliverables/tasks versus discussions
>> also seems like a really useful one. perhaps people could even have a
>> preferred default view setting in their account settings. there was a thread
>> a while ago with mockups for study groups (maybe from alison? sorry i can't
>> remember!) that highlighted tasks and discussions with summary boxes at the
>> top of the course homepage, *before* the user is presented with the nitty
>> gritty course activity.
>>
>> in my experience, peoples' first time looking at a p2pu course homepage
>> (now more than just one observation), the key actionable items ("task",
>> "signup" and even "full description" which isn't an actionable but is
>> important) don't get found. they are buried under the activity stream--
>> which is more useful once you've signed up for a course.
>>
>> Jessy
>> --
>> http://jessykate.com
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 7:24 PM, Stian Håklev <shaklev at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Since we've been discussing quite a bit how to make the discussion forum
>>> / tasks more effective, I thought I'd take some screenshots of an
>>> environment developed by a professor at my school of ed, which I used for an
>>> online course this term. It worked quite well - really "got out of the way",
>>> and enabled us to focus on the discussion.
>>>
>>> https://picasaweb.google.com/shaklev/KnowledgeECommons#
>>>
>>> You can choose to view each forum in three ways - either like a threaded
>>> discussion forum with only the titles listed, where clicking on a message
>>> loads that message on the whole screen. Or a split screen email-like view,
>>> with threaded discussions on the left, and messages on the right. Or,
>>> finally, a "full content view", where the entire content of each message is
>>> listed under each other (like P2PU right now).  When replying, you see the
>>> message you reply to on one side, and the reply on the right.
>>>
>>> He also has an experimental mode where each forum gets an embedded
>>> Etherpad, which can be used to keep track of important issues etc.
>>>
>>> Not suggesting we do things exactly like this, but I think it's useful to
>>> see how others have done it. Also important to separate between courses
>>> where the tasks/courses mainly play a coordinating/metadiscussion function,
>>> and most of the "learning" or activity happens in other places, and courses
>>> where the deep discussion happening on P2PU is the core function.
>>>
>>> (also note that it's possible at any time to see who has read a note -
>>> this functionality is available to everyone, not just the course organizer).
>>>
>>> Stian
>>>
>>> --
>>> http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> p2pu-dev mailing list
>>> p2pu-dev at lists.p2pu.org
>>> http://lists.p2pu.org/mailman/listinfo/p2pu-dev
>>>
>>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters
>
>
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