Distributing the Dialogues
In the discussion thread Dialogues (help!) there has been some mention of the tendency of the cck11 network to concentrate itself in the gRSShopper site and perhaps also on Facebook. In the interest of encouraging a more distributed network, I suggest that when a discussion has been started by commenting on the gRSShopper listing of a blog post (is there any other way?) subsequent contributions to the discussion be made as comments on the original post rather than on the gRSShopper site.
February 22nd, 2011 at 12:21 pm
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February 22nd, 2011 at 3:06 pm
I posted this on the CCK11 forum today – should show up there as a new discussion thread tomorrow:
Hi Alan
Thanks for the idea of distributing the discussions away from this forum. It’s probably a good idea. I find that here the discussion is steered in certain directions (mesh networks are the best, for example) without much debate on the issue. I feel that I am being asked to “take my word for it”. Hopefully I can contribute to a discussion on your blog, but I may have to lurk for awhile, as my limited neural network capacity is required for the completion of some other chores. Have you joined the FB group yet?
This could be a good discussion:
http://qpr.ca/blogs/cck11/2011/02/22/groups-vs-networks/
Cheers
Ken
February 24th, 2011 at 4:46 am
Like the idea of responding to the post at its source. If the discussion originates at a particular blog, building the thread there makes sense. Serves the distribution requirement but does it improve the quality of the conversation? Why are conversations spread all over the net preferable to having one collective forum? The single forum means I spend less time “in transit” and can more easily monitor many conversations.
Very hard to maintain a presence as a participant when you are spread everywhere. In fact, I would suggest this stops becoming a collective project and the learning is diminished by the simple physics of dissipation. (There’s also the problem for credit students such as myself of losing “participation” points).
An argument for spreading the discussion around is to avoid the conversation being restricted. This doesn’t really solve anything though, control of the classroom still equals control of the course equals who gets to call themselves a student and have a legitimate voice.
February 24th, 2011 at 6:28 am
Yes, it’s a challenge. But if Stephen wants to encourage, measure, and reward the building of a distributed network then he will have to find a way of getting informed of all these comments. That will ultimately be useful for all of us because, whether in a class like this or not, we all regularly face the question of whether to comment on a blog item or post to our own listeners about the item (or both). Trackback was supposed to solve this problem but was defeated by spammers (and perhaps also by its own incompleteness and other issues). With better anti-comment-spam technology it may be possible to revive an interest in a Trackback-like solution. Then we could post our own comments and have them show up both at the source and in our own output stream.