Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Forums Review by the UAB

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Posted by Bruce Spear on
As ever, we are learning as we go along, and now we are thinking that the way to go would be for us to review our first use cases and develop them in more detail.  I also think it might be helpful if others were interested in helping us with their own use cases -- short, maybe a paragraph to start.  Also, might anyone have experience with this and be willing to offer some advice on how best to proceed?  Thanks!

Bruce

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Posted by Jeff Davis on
Bruce, Use cases and existing examples in other forum software would be great here. In particular 6 and 7 are sort of lost on me when it comes to concrete implementations (and to be honest 7 is lost on me entirely although guess it would help if I knew what didactic meant :) )

Is 6 to facilitate structured converstions (like Winograd's "Conversations for Action" model) or simply a navigational aid?

It would be nice if there were some peoples names attached to the specific things which probably need some iterations to get right (esp 3,6,7, and 10).

I think in what I have been working on for communities of practice I will at least touch on 2,4,5, and 11; and it would be useful to be able to get some feedback if what I have done suitably addresses some of those issues.

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Posted by Matthias Melcher on
Jeff,

thank you very much for starting with concrete details. Although I don't know yet how this discussion may be done best, I don't want to waste time and tell you want I think important about #3 and #10 (not speaking for the UAB here).

For #3, I would be happy to have SOME way to expand and collapse individual postings and subtrees, perhaps with a "+" and "-" toggle similar to windows explorer (sorry, or in Mozilla preferences menu). The most important reason is that, for instance, within the use case of humanities discussions, threads simply become too long to keep orientation within the thread.

For #10, the idea is to allow users to read much text in a narrow pane without being forced to adjust the window width each time they leave a page with wider content (e. g. navigation) and enter a text intensive page. (Narrow reading panes might irritate programmers but are important for text-intensive work, and newspaper columns are therefore narrow since many decades). At the same time, the saved space could be used for breadcrumb navigation in a left-hand side pane instad of wasting space in the top for the breadcrumbs.

Regarding #2, #6, #7, I do think they touch your communities of practice work and I would like to learn more about it.