First Concretely: Solution Grove has also worked on a new forum layout with collapse/expand and thumbnails of the users like Moodle has (minus the smile face). We are working on getting a demo up where we can show it to the community then we'll post the code.
Philosophically: I think we should be thinking differently about Forums. We shouldn't be thinking about what the *best* Forums for OpenACS or dotLRN. There is no one right way. What we should be thinking about how we can allow programmers and admin to create the type of discussion board that fits their use.
Michael Feldstein has a blog post that touches on this:
http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/permalink/why_we_need_more_standards/
While a good teacher can cultivate quality learning experiences (online or otherwise) with a rock and a stick, the truth is that today’s online learning environments don’t really help them much. The majority of online courses basically use the LMS as a discussion board (a.k.a. “the rock") and a file sharing system (a.k.a. “the stick"). There are several reasons why interoperability standards should help this situation a great deal.I’ve made the long tail argument many times before, but to recap, we need many specialized learning applications to teach specific skills within specific disciplines using specific teaching methods. It’s easy to trivialize this argument as talking about a bunch of edge cases. But that would be a mistake. The whole idea behind the “long tail” is that the total number of edge cases outnumbers the total number of core cases. So we are possibly ignoring the majority of needs when we ignore the long tail. And to give a sense of just how long the tail is, consider that most LMS’s still don’t have blogs or wikis built in. These mainstays of online communication everywhere except the LMS are apparently too far out on the tail to merit commitment of the highly limited development resources by the LMS creators (both Open and proprietary).
But the long tail argument probably doesn’t even go far enough. I would argue that even many of the “core” LMS applications, properly designed, really should be situated software, meaning that the applications should be tailored to the needs of the individuals rather than created one-size-fits-all. For example, most online gradebooks suck because they have to account for many, many different possible grading schemes. Which means they do none of them simply/well. Most faculty are happier just using spreadsheets, even though it means they have to manually enter their data. Spreadsheets are situated software. They are designed for a particular situation, developed inexpensively, and thrown away when they are no longer useful. One could make the same argument about discussion board interfaces.
In fact, one did. Here is the paper I presented this week at Ed-Media 2006. Among other things, I argue that interface details of a discussion forum matter and are differentially suited for different teaching purposes. Can you design a discussion board with different display options? Sure. But that general strategy can only be stretched so far. (Witness the gradebook.) The only way to deal with this problem is to encourage the proliferation of plug-and-play teaching apps.
The paper he references is:
http://mfeldstein.com/images/uploads/Toward_Habitable_Learning_Environments.pdf
