Hi, I’ve been using computer conferencing systems and forums since the early 1980s, and am one of the founders of online education in the world.. I teach online, engage students in collaborative learning and teamwork online, as well as conduct research, publish my studies, and have also built the Learning Theory Collaborativism. Generally, over the past 30 years we have discovered that calculating time spent online is not necessarily a great indicator of the quality of engagement. But if you do use it in a comparative way (user v. group) it can have some value. Far better is comparing the # of messages or message volume/pp in a particular period. Comparision of the individual to the group discourse is also helpful. Best of all, I believe, is to study the quality of the messages/discourse. I’m personally far more interested in discourse analysis, not just the quantity of messaging. Of especially important and interest is to code the transcript to sstudy if there a demonstrative change over time (i.e., progress in the quality of the discourse, the arguments used, references made, the positions taken). Hence I am concerned tht the nature of the “discourse” in this forum is quite primitive (or perhaps I have not yet really seen its full features). Here is a brief list of features that I feel are essential…are they in the software? Are they easy to build in? 1. Are messages in a topic numbered? 2. Can I search by key word? chronology? reverse chronology? subject? sender? 3. can I sort the messages into various perspectives? 4. How are replies linked to comments? 5. Can I easily see/sort # of messages by sender? 6. Can I include a space for a keyword by each sender? Can someone help me, pls? Thank you very much. Cheers, Linda

Hi Linda, Here is my attempt at your questions, I do have a bit of trouble framing some of them into Discourse concepts, but here is my shot nonetheless. [תמונה] eLinda: Are messages in a topic numbered? Yes they are, we do not expose this in the UI, if you click the link glyph under the post, :link: you can see a link to a specific post with the post number. A theme could add numbers if it wished, but we always opt to decrease visual noise on the screen by default. [תמונה] eLinda: Can I search by key word? chronology? reverse chronology? subject? sender? Check out our advanced search page for most of the options Search results for '' - Discourse Meta [תמונה] eLinda: can I sort the messages into various perspectives? You can both tag and categorize topics, as an administrator you can also tag messages. That allows you to split related topics into buckets. [תמונה] eLinda: How are replies linked to comments? You can quote stuff ^^^ like this or just reply and we carry a relationship [תמונה] eLinda: Can I easily see/sort # of messages by sender? This is an email kind of concept every user has a user page that covers full user stats, additionally you have Discourse Meta [תמונה] eLinda: Can I include a space for a keyword by each sender? I think tags is what you are after, but I am not sure.

Hi, Linda. I started grad school in Instructional Technology at Vanderbilt 1995 (back in the days when Bransford, Kinser were there) and remember your work. I left academics for my wife to take a tenure-track position. She does Discourse analysis and uses Discursive Psychology. I have some experience pulling data out of various fora into forms that work with tools like ATLAS.ti. I started using Discourse as a tool to teach my online classes. I promise that it’s worlds better than the discussion tools I’ve seen in Moodle, Sakai, or Canvas. I think that Discourse’s measure of time spent reading is a bit more nuanced than some earlier measures of “time online”, so it may be more useful than you think. Rather than “how long was the modem on”, Discourse can sort-of tell if someone is reading stuff and for how long, a measure that I have not really seen in any other forum software. If someone spends all of their time posting messages and never reads any, they are not likely to be a very valuable contributor. I’m not aware of research that looks at those values, but I’ve been out of that game for a while. I don’t think that it would be quite possible to use Discourse’s tags to mark posts the way one might with tools like ATLAS.ti or NVivo. Discourse’s tagging granularity is at the topic level, not even the post level; I’d think that you’d want to be able to code at the level of a sentence or paragraph. Your questions seem to be from the perspective of one wanting to analyze discourse, not participate in it. From a user (not Discourse analysis) perspective, Discourse does a lot to support discourse. The searching features are as good as I have seen in other forums. [תמונה] eLinda: Are messages in a topic numbered? As mentioned already, for a participant, numbers are superfluous and noisy. I’ll admit to sometimes numbering things that I am talking or writing about, but if I get past 5, it’s a good bet that people have stopped listening. The way that threading is indicated is confusing to people at first, but all the information you need is there. Each post is put at the end of the discussion. Which message one is replying to is made clear by links back up to the message one is replying to, and those replies also are indicated back up where the message one is replying to is. A big win is that whether there are 8, 80, or 800 posts in a topic, one can just keep scrolling down to read the entire discussion. You don’t have to continually click to the next page to keep reading. (And don’t get me started on how many clicks it takes to read a discussion of more than 10 messages in Facebook). If you haven’t seen it already, check out Discourse features | Discourse - Civilized Discussion. A significant part of my living comes from moving communities from other platforms to Discourse. I think it would be a very interesting study to look at the structure of conversations before and after the transition. It could be an interesting study, as you could get data from multiple communities and the coder would not even need to know when the transition happened (since all data is now in Discourse). One could then see if there was some point in the data that conversation patterns changed. Does that help?

Dear Sam, Thank you for your time and generosity in responding to my questions. I have been in the field of online education and discourse for over 30 years, and I have seen and used many systems. I am not a techie but an educator and researcher of online discourse, so I apologize for my simplisitic questions. I want to congratulate you as co-founder of this software, because in my 3 decades of work in this field, DIscourse is coming back to the key principles of online discussion and supporting key features for productive and progressive discussion and effective collaboration. I plan to devote more time to get to know your system, and to assess it for educational application. I think it could really be a winner. Two last questions for now: how does tagging work? Can there be a set of tags, which could be applied to each post in a topic (or conference—I don’t know yet which terms you use). A tag as a pre-set annotation, and/or a tag as an open annotation? If so, are such tags visible to the group? Is it easy to download parts of the forum? To a printer? to download just the tags, for example into a word or excel document? I invite you to read my next message, responding to Jay…in which my educational focus is more clearly set out. Thank you, Cordially, Linda

Dear Jay, Thank you for your thoughtful responses to my questions. It is a pleasure to have responses from someone who knows both the technology, as well as having insights into the educational applications. This is a real treat. As you may know I am one of the inventors of online education, having designed and taught the first fully online university course in the world (1986, University of Toronto). For the past 32 years I have been teaching online, building a theoretical approach entitled Collaborativism (Harasim, 2017), whereby to study learning effectiveness in online education, and developing a Collaborativist pedagogy and a research methodology based on discourse (transcript) analysis. Until 4 years ago I was using the learning environment that we developed in the 1990s, called Virtual-U that had a very powerful and robust forum as its centerpiece. For me, discourse is the heart and soul of learning. However, when the system went down there was no one @SFU who could reboot it and I have been stuck using Canvas for my online courses. I have been seeking an alternative system for many years, since as you say, Canvas, Moodle, D2L, Blackboard are horrible and are utterly impossible for real learning because they do not support collaborative discourse. I have looked at blogging software, general forums, Slack, etc. Nothing that can support state-of-the-art online education, training, collaboration, knowledge building, etc. The idea of developing my own software remains alive but that is another story. But then I came across @Discourse, which has triggered my interest. As you guessed my questions were posed from the perspective of the researcher (in which I include the student and the teacher as researchers) who can benefit from the formative analytics. I have developed a research methodology to visualize and study learning online. So the nature of the messaging system is very important. Also, clearly, I am equally interested in how well @Discourse could be shaped into a learning environment for instructors and learners. So, given that context, I will respond to your comments and questions: I’m interested in what you mean by Discursive Psychology, and your wife’s methodology for discourse analysis. Let’s share papers. I just completed a chapter on my discourse analytics methodology. Your work with nVIVO and ATLAS.ti sounds interesting. I invested a lot of money in the 1990s in training researchers and students to use ATLAS, and nVIVO. Our work did not lead to promising results. Did you have a different experience? BIG Question: Why number posts??? I am incredulous at the response by you and Sam Saffron, which dismissed numbering posts chronologically as “noise”. NO way! Not noise but very informative cognitive markers and meaning makers. In my courses, discourse is the single key learning activity—one of my favorite pedagogies is what I call: SOS (Student-mediated Online Seminars). In a class let’s say of 16 students, around 120 messages per week are posted. Automatic numbering of each post is very important for many reasons such as: message number helps the student discussants locate where they are in the seminar, understand the size of the seminar to date, and determine their pace of participation. Also, student moderators get a sense of the volume and progress of the seminar and are better able to facilitate movement and advancement. Of course my analyses are not only quantitative, but primarily qualitative. To do qualitative analyses (or retrospective analysis), we code each message according to learning type, date, sender, message size, etc etc. Since Canvas does not number the posts, students have to print out the transcript, and then reorganize the posts chronologically, and then manually number each post in order to code it. My students have written many critiques of Canvas because the Discussion forum does NOT automatically number each post, and students find it infuriating. So do I. The pioneers of online education in the 1980s and early 1990s used computer conferencing systems such as EIES, Participate, Confer, *Forum, CoSy. Messages in the conferences/forums were always numbered, and many provided multiple perspectives on the discourse. This is ESSENTIAL, imho. (FYI: my Virtual-U system numbers each post, and could also scroll without stopping at each page. These features are not mutually exclusive) Finally, a brief comment on time: truly there is not much valuable information that you can wring out of this indicator, imho. Time on a post can signify SO MANY things: looking up a reference, using a dictionary, taking longer to understand the post, taking longer to compose a post, being interrupted by something external, getting a coffee, becoming distracted, ……Time on a message is very subjective and attempts to analyze the reasons are assumption which cannot be empirically proven. Participate, the system that I used at OISE, actually showed which user had read a message. Simpler, overall with roughly the same (few) gains. So Jay, I would very much like your assistance in helping me to consider transferring my online courses to @Discourse. And Sam Saffron, I hope that we can continue our discussions about the messaging features of @Discourse. So far, I think it is great. As I said earlier, I can see lots of ways to make it a winner for educational adoption. Cordially, Linda

It’s great to have someone systematically assess discourse for use in education. You might also be interested in this topic about discourse in academia more broadly: [תמונה] Discourse for Academic Use Features (Done and to be Done) Feature I want to have a special topic about how to use Discourse for Academic Use. 1. What we already have? Markdown Supporting. Html Supporting OneBox Feature MathJax Supporting with plugin. - git clone https://github.com/kasperpeulen/discourse-mathjax I have to say it was conflict with another plugin “iframe”. If you have iframe plugin, you have to delete it. Also another plugin can do it: Footnote and Reference https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-footnote/84533/20 DOI resolver https://m… and this blog post (if you have not already seen it): [תמונה] Discourse for Online Education Communities Just like our survey for game communities back in May, we once more sent out a survey to a mix of customers and self-supported Discourse communities. This time we wanted feedback from leaders in online education. [תמונה] pfaffman: I promise that it’s worlds better than the discussion tools I’ve seen in Moodle, Sakai, or Canvas It’s important to emphasize the “discussion tools” part here. In other words: discourse clearly can’t replace a complete LMS. And the problem is that if you are already using an LMS (for whatever reason, but most likely because your school is using it) adding discourse into the picture just makes everything so much more complicated, both for students and for teachers. This raises the question of integrations or “integrability”. What would it take to integrate discourse into Canvas so that it could be used instead of Canvas’ native discussion module? There is an excellent (and perhaps better) alternative solution, though, which already integrates into Canvas: [Hypothesis in Canvas: Collaborative Annotation as Discussion Forum 2.0] I love hyposthesis and I think it might be more suitable a tool for online discussion because it turns the entire WWW into material for students to annotate and discuss. However (!), hypothesis’ main mission is annotation, not discussion (though the two are very closely linked and hypothesis does a decent job at facilitating discussion). So I’m dreaming of a better integration between hypothesis and discourse, in which hypothesis would be could at web annotations and discourse would take over once the discussion gets bigger.

[תמונה] eLinda: message number helps the student discussants locate where they are in the seminar, understand the size of the seminar to date, and determine their pace of participation I think Discourse accomplishes that with the “page navigation” widget on the right. It shows the number of the currently visible post, not a label on each individual one, but that should be enough to give them a sense of place. It also shows the total post count, and a “progress bar” of your progress. [תמונה] eLinda: Is it easy to download parts of the forum? To a printer? to download just the tags, for example into a word or excel document? Discourse Data Explorer will give you a CSV if that’s good enough for what you need.

[תמונה] sam: Yes they are, we do not expose this in the UI, if you click the link glyph under the post, :link: you can see a link to a specific post with the post number. Actually, Discourse does expose post number within each topic: It’s in the slider widgets on the right side of the screen. Your post was 2/7 (at the time before I made my reply). It’s listed in the editor when I quoted you, above.

[תמונה] downey: It’s in the slider widgets on the right side of the screen. Your post was 2/7 (at the time before I made my reply). Kinda, because the scroll bar numbers are relative since they don’t count whispers, deletions, etc.

[תמונה] eLinda: So Jay, I would very much like your assistance in helping me to consider transferring my online courses to @Discourse. That’s what I do for a living these days, @eLinda! Please contact support@literatecomputing.com and we can discuss how I can help. Here’s a syllabus that I used when teaching with Discourse. I developed scripts to help pull data from Discourse and upload to Sakai’s grade book. I could probably do something similar to ease some of the pain of Canvas.

We use this even though the more astute may notice a sequence discrepancy (eg. 3 and 4 are missing in this topic) * disregard the red box, that’s a link highlighter a.post-date:after { content: " #" attr(data-post-number); } [post-number]

Questions regarding Discourse features

תמיכה

Falco (Falco) 24 באפריל,‏ 2018,‏ 6:42pm 11

Kinda, because the scroll bar numbers are relative since they don’t count whispers, deletions, etc.

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