{"id":1153,"date":"2011-09-12T20:35:59","date_gmt":"2011-09-13T04:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=1153"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:06:39","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:06:39","slug":"a-funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2011\/09\/a-funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-the\/","title":{"rendered":"A funny thing happened on the way to the…"},"content":{"rendered":"

We don’t have a forum at our POT Certificate Class <\/a>SMOOC (Small-to-Medium Open Online Class). Nor a Google Group (though that’s been suggested and may appear), nor a Moodle forum, nor a Ning.<\/p>\n

When I took EC&I 831<\/a> from Alec Couros last fall, I felt we needed a forum, and he and I looked for one we liked, but nothing we found had the particular combination we wanted (no ads, free, nested comments and the ability to post multimedia), so we gave it up. On his current page for this semester<\/a>, he’s listed many types of communication, but not a forum.<\/p>\n

And now I notice that the Change MOOC<\/a>, co-hosted by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, has a forum, but it’s kinda awkward. Not like a full-featured thing at all. On the main page, there are three Participating links for blogs, two for the newsletter, one for the backchannel, and one for threads. The class starts tomorrow and there are three posts for a class of hundreds.<\/p>\n

And yet, all my college history classes feature forums as the heart of the action<\/a>. I couldn’t do without them.<\/p>\n

So why no forums for these classes? I think because the idea of distributed communication<\/strong> has become something we’re all taking seriously.<\/p>\n

If we’re going to focus on the wonders of learning on the web as our topic<\/em>, it makes sense that our participants should be communicating there rather than in a central location. We not only want them communicating via blogs, wikis and Facebook, but we also want them creating their own places and spaces (which is why the potcert11 class may yet have a Google Group, because the participants may be creating it — and they’re starting the Twitter thing, not me).<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\"chart\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
From Rick Schwier’s Pursuing the elusive metaphor
\nof community in e-learning environments<\/a><\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

I also think there’s more staying power to a distributed community. If you have one space, as we all know from using learning management systems, the course seems finite. Even if the space is available after the class is over, the feeling<\/em> is still that the class is over. But if the conversation is distributed (our class has a very active Facebook group, which surprised the heck out me), there’s a feeling of perpetuity. The river continues and you step in and out when you wish.<\/p>\n

As Rick Schwier has noted, informal communities have higher levels of engagement over time. I wonder whether de-emphasizing a formal location for conversation makes these classes lean more toward informal learning, even though they are organized as classes, with set timeframes.<\/p>\n

So come on, hit me with the research. Do distributed communities last longer? Are we right to “force” them instead of offering a rich place for a single discussion?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We don’t have a forum at our POT Certificate Class SMOOC (Small-to-Medium Open Online Class). Nor a Google Group (though that’s been suggested and may appear), nor a Moodle forum, nor a Ning. When I took EC&I 831 from Alec Couros last fall, I felt we needed a forum, and he and I looked for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,38,39,10,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion","category-interactivity","category-moocs","category-online-teaching","category-web-20"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9986,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153\/revisions\/9986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}