Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Might anyone like to design and build an e-mail centered forum enhancement?
I'm comfortable searching and sorting through lists, but when asking students to do a sequence of activities using unfamiliar and complex technology I find I must create a clear schedule of activities and reduce confusion to a minimum. So, I can't simply ask students to print out lots of stuff (unlike many faculty, most do not have laser printers and limitless piles of paper and toner), and if I can save them five minutes of sorting through heaps that is five minutes more of the total of 90 minutes per week I can ask of them altogether: I think the success of this technology depends on maintaining high rates of return (increasing learning, fun, etc.) for the considerable investment (learning how to use the platform, logging on, clicking through links) this technology requires.
The students have many courses, jobs, a love life, etc., and to help them consolidate and extend their learning I am sequencing activies during the six days outside of class. So, groups of ten students post book review to a forum by Saturday and so get to see and learn from each other's work It is nice they can get notifications pouring in, reminding them of the deadline and offering potential solutions to the problem, and it is nice they can print out the whole thread to examine their own work in context. Now it gets complicated: they must also choose among the submitted work to prepare a written response by Tuesday, and for this it is terrific they can print out an individual notification. But as they are learning about the writing of good responses, too, if they are to learn from the responses of others they need to see what the response is referring to: hence, my wanting them to print out a given item: why the simple icon idea is the way to go!
Of course, students could print out and collate the notifications, but in practice they don't go to the trouble. But if they are presented with a forum entry and its response together on one page, as I presently do by cutting and pasting and making copies for class discussion, they would have no excuse for not reading both together, and better, this presentation form highlights dialogue as an object of study: in this class, non-native speakers are learning the languages of working groups and problem-solving, too (for example, the difference between "you should do this ..." and "it might be helpful to consider ...").
On this point, I'm wondering about what work is being done on expanding and collapsing threads in the forums. I've started using gmail and love the threading feature, where emails responding to others are viewed together and in sequence and where you are first presented with but the headers of each in order and then can expand one or more. This format preserves relationships, as they advertise, and being able to view a dozen or more emails solving a problem is a tremendous resource for the study of project development and management.
