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

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25: Re: Forums Review by the UAB (response to 24)
Posted by Jeff Davis on 05/05/04 11:23 PM
As a starting point for tracking down some concrete examples I looked at some of the popular forums packages (and news reader things).

Here are some examples of framed browsers for long threads: google and gmane. Gmane is nice since it tracks what you have read, and has a collection of well chosen key shortcuts, but it does not let you collapse threads at all.

I think we could take a google style sidebar nav (which is pretty easy to implement) and use Morten's tree menu to construct a collapsable tree menu (the code is BSD licensed so could be included in OpenACS).

For reference here is what UBB looks like Flat and UBB threaded

And phpBB One thread and One forum The support forum for phpBB has something like 100,000 threads and 500k posts which gives you an idea of how many users of phpBB there are. Sticky threads stay at the top of the front page and announcements are present on all thread pages. The user profile pages are good and presenting post count is useful I think. Another thing to take away from phpBB is how nice some of the themes are.

And in the make your head explode category: ezboard. ezboard has a tremendous number of forums with giant numbers of posts, and there are some useful ideas there, although obviously it's not really intended to support serious persistent threaded discussions.

One of the best things to look at is kuro5hin (sort of slashdot.org but with generally higher quality discussions). posts are rated, can be presented threaded or flat, they distinguish editorial versus topical posts (although to be honest people mostly don't classify them properly).

If you set Display: "dynamic, threaded", you can see the expandable and collapsable threads. I think this might be the closest to what you are talking about for #3.

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28: Re: Forums Review by the UAB (response to 25)
Posted by Matthias Melcher on 05/08/04 07:51 PM
Thank you, Jeff.
Although I could not look into kuro5hin, "dynamic, threaded", sounds fine.

You asked me "Are any of the discussions from Dorothea's course online somewhere  that I could look at to get a feel for how deep the nesting is and how long the posts are typically?"

I put an anonymized thread up her http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~x28/911/ .

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33: Re: Forums Review by the UAB (response to 25)
Posted by Dorothea Fischer-Hornung on 05/11/04 08:07 PM
Thanks, Jeff. I went thorough all your links. For me gmane was easiest to use, but I may just be a habit of using panes in the top/bottom format. But I also thought that having the name of the threads plus the subheaders clearly listed in text more accessible to me. The left navigation and the tree on google do the same thing, but looks very "techie" for a non-techie user like me.

The PhpBB has always been a favorite for me since there are so many things you can choose to do with it. It seems clean, well-structured and very user friendly.

I have no idea where this gets us, but this is this user’s opinion.

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34: Re: Forums Review by the UAB (response to 28)
Posted by Dorothea Fischer-Hornung on 05/11/04 08:14 PM
Wow, Matthias, What a great analysis of three days of work! If you were to compare my two sections of this course (about 13-15 in each section) you would see that it has exploded exponentially in just a few days.

The two sections have dealt with the forum very differently. I had given both sections clear instructions to post ALL their contributions under the Week 1 header. One section complied very well, which lead to a VERY long thread of contributions. The other section has many individual headers: either they can't read and follow instructions or they instinctively tried to create a personal section structure. The result is very confusing since there is no way to relate contributions for one thread to another and there is no way for me as a teacher to move things to try to do some didactic "housekeeping."

Your contribution showed me how very complex our forum structure is (after only 3 days!) and why I feel the need so strongly for a better tool. Thanks for visualizing this for all of us.

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35: Re: Forums Review by the UAB (response to 33)
Posted by Jeff Davis on 05/11/04 08:33 PM
On #5 (advanced sorting), it says "and a way of making one’s favorites and sorting accordingly."

Does that mean marking people as favorites and sorting by threads in which they have participated or marking threads as favorites?

Dorothea, are you aware of a phpBB site which does some of the different threading views (#3) that I could look at?

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39: Re: Forums Review by the UAB (response to 35)
Posted by Bruce Spear on 05/12/04 10:09 PM
I've been wondering about this sorting business.  I'd assume it would be easy and generally useful to be able to sort by date, author, and topic, but the weak point of this idea is "generally", since sorting is something we do all the time anyway without thinking.  The criteria I'd want to ponder is "relevance", and since I think in terms of the academic quarter, I think of a limited number of threads per class and that these stay in the meaningful sequence of the course/syllabus: for these purposes, we're not talking about a lot of forum postings like we have on our Dotlrn Q&A forum.  I know there are other users besides classroom, but rather than a "general" solution that might please nobody, I'd rather two or more specific solutions that you could choose to fit specific purposes.  Hence, I am concentration on the academic seminar and lecture as I know it best and think it the primary forum format for my university circles.  As an instructor, I'd like to sort by student as I think we may do well to head in the direction of the academic portfolio and a review of a student's forum postings I would want to see associated with his homework assignments, survey answers, and so collate her work, and having announced that I would do this, encourage participation in a number of formats. From a marketing and, say, attracting instructors, instead of saying we can sort the thing a dozen ways like a rubix cube that fascinates the engineer who sees the beauty in all logical possibilities, I'd rather say we can switch forum features to highlight the stages in project development, or the stages or sequences of a given student's commentaries, or a list of all forum entries containing a url students have found to fulfill an assignment and expressed in a table so we could easily collate them as a portal on this topic.  That is, I'd recommend that designers conduct interviews and observations of classroom activities, compile lists of specific needs that might be served, and build components such as forums that can be switched from one precise use to another rather than including all and so leveling the precision of each.  How about that?