Too many forums?
We had an informal get together yesterday with the Research ‘arm’ of the OpenLearn project – basically to see how we (as in the developers and other member of the OL team) can be using the OpenLearn sites ourselves, essentially with the view to encouraging other users to participate more in the site.
One thing we noticed was that there seemed to be too many forums on the site (Steve has written about this on his blog). My feeling is that learning journals aren’t a good substitute for forums – they each serve different purposes – and that we should focus on just reducing the number of forums and making them more easily accessible (they can be a bit tricky to find, even though there are so many!)
Too many forums?
Amen to that. Imagine how it is for us colonials who surf in to your labspace.open.ac.uk, hit the “Discussion Forums” button (on the right), which is logically the general discussion area, reading through the four threads, and then, after surfing around a bit more, find Patrick is is having a two discussions – one about ‘researching users’, another about ‘disseminating research’ over in ‘his’ space. If it wasn’t so common it would be confusing.
And ‘Learning journals’ to me are interchangeable with personal blogs like this (bloody good) one.
It’s providing a big enough context for all the forums in the first place that helps a newbie get orientated. This is a WORLD wide web after all. To give your institutional forums a context I’ll just point to this comment over at OCW http://ocwcforum.org/viewtopic.php?t=48
MSG would be a nice addition to their list.
It’s really hard to think in terms of Global groups when everyone is trained to think in terms of Institutional researchers and developers, isn’t it? Your group might be interested in John’s prop to HP. http://ocwcforum.org/docs/HewlettConsortiumProposaFinal.doc
BTW Thanks to everyone at your end for communicating.
Forums aren’t taken seriously just yet inside National instititutions.
But you’d appreciate that the web designers/programmers outside
the institutions have been grouping, Globally, for a few years now. E.g http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/ It explains why this site is about 250 on Alexa’s top 5000