5.01 Discussion lists

Notes.

Newsgroups

Firstly there seems to be a lot of spurious postings with a single entry in many of the lists I looked into on 'usenet' - maybe I was looking at the wrong ones. Seems a lot of effort for little return - I don't see unless one set up a specific 'newsgroup' for your own topic how they can be effectively used.

One of the problems is discussion groups is the organisation /visualisation of information. I like googles approach to this in that the structure shows on the left and the message on the right as in the thread about Content managment systems

Lists

Yahoo groups - Many of the list seem to have very few members which made me wonder whether they had critical mass to survive or what purpose they served. Difficult to find one that is useful although decided to joint the Instructional Designers Forum. Yahoo groups is an advertised service so there seem to be alot of adverts to get through. Even with quite a few members it seemd empty and irrelevant.

JISCmail - I think this is a great type of lists service and have used it regularly i.e. where the community is fairly focused and allows user to browse or join where appropriate e.g. the site for the Association of History and Computing or The Computing in Archaeological Fieldwork. Although the latter example shows one of the weaknesses of the JISCMail lists in that it does not clearly indicate that the list is no longer used. The other weakness is knowing which group is the relevant one to join - I would think that these lists perhaps support other F2F communities and have not come into their own through the buildingf of an online community. I'd be interested to read around the subject of creation and management of such lists so that they have an effective purpose.

BECTa Communities - this seemed quite active and focused on a 'conference' type mechanism. Interestingly one of the areas I found was a group for the ICT Advice Online Conference and Exhibition May 2002' although you may not be able to access it unless you join th eBECTA community - quite simple to do. It's worth looking at because we could use how they have organised it as an example for ours - the web pages are extremely clear and concise.

Discussion boards - I found these, while perhaps low in numbers and participation, quite useful in that they are like lists fairly clear, concise and specific. Both the common room and VLS seem to have some useful threads although many posting seem quite out of date for the latter. The flash discussion board seemed enormous and provided lots of topics and tips.

Conclusions

There needs to be careful thought and management of discussion type boards before using them within online learning / communities. The online communities book specifically refers to some of the issues associated with this type of list e.g. too many / too few postings. As a user one wonders whether the effort is worth while for the return that is gained. Benefits come from actively being involved and using them as a forum to get information or alternatively as a messaging service for experts interested in that field.