The new categories: short and sweet, or more options?

Continuing the discussion from Category for community discussions:

In discussing the best place(s) for general discussion such as discussion questions and off-topic but impassioned conversations, @CyberParra and I began to recall the different areas offered in the Learning Creative Learning Google Community.

There have already been a lot of changes to what looks like our new area, including unique features we did not have at the Google Community.

One change so far has been the different areas available for posting.

@Grif has mentioned a possibility of location-specific posting areas for people to seek out other LCL'ers in their area, and there may be other areas being mulled over.

At the time of this post, we seem to be pared-down to a minimalist five categories (Introduce Yourself, Course Announcements, Ask, Share, and About this Forum).

Through discussion here in About this Forum and by reading the descriptive summaries of each category, it looks like most of the categories we had at the Learning Creative Learning Google Community have been consolidated into these five categories.

This thread aims to look at whether it may be more useful to create additional categories or to leave the new categories as they are and figure out how we can adapt to use them best.

I think a goal in this discussion should be to work even more towards a balance of a few important factors (I use the word "should" objectively and lightly below):

1. New users should be able to easily familiarize with the site without feeling lost or overwhelmed.
2. A user that wishes to post should be able to have or quickly arrive upon a consistent idea of where to place that post with little room for second-guessing or confusion.
3. All types of posts that are expected and encouraged should have a clear area that is easy to find.
4. With both posting and reading purposes in mind, areas that encompass multiple types of posts should do so in a way that is complimentary or somehow beneficial and not distracting, overwhelming, or too chaotic in variance.

There might be other items that are important to me for consideration here, but that is all I can think of right now.

That is not to say that those considerations are correct, most-correct, or more-correct. That is not even stating that these forums somehow deviate from those considerations as-is!

What I can say is that when I first came to this new place, I was a little disoriented in part. I was not sure if general discussion had a place yet on one hand, but on the other I was relieved to see the meta discussion area About this Forum. Gosh, I have a lot of hands today. Sheesh.

One of my favorite things about Stack Exchange is the meta discussion area found in different stacks. It makes a lot of sense that we would have something similar here in this collaborative educational experiment. So I really like that.

As far as being a little disoriented, I want to clarify that 1). I can be disoriented easily at first, 2). it was easy enough to work through, 3). it wasn't enough to discourage me in the slightest and I do not feel somehow at loss or disappointed, and 4). that's just me but for any other potentially-disoriented LCL'ers, it will probably become even easier as the unfamiliarized become familiar with the different areas once more content finds its way to the correct areas. It'll probably just be easy to see where things go, and I really am probably focusing too much on this.

I also want to clarify that I think LCL has outdone itself and set another high bar. I think we will be fine whatever happens, and this is going to be exciting.

Does anyone have any ideas about any of this?

Without more feedback from others, I am personally leaning towards wishing we also had a Discussion area like @CyberParra and I have been reminiscing over.

I also liked special areas such as Ask the Panel. I think there are probably a few types of special areas like Ask the Panel that would be useful and that we could have a lot of fun with. For asking the panel, there are alternatives, though, such as Twitter hashtags, questions in chat, and other options, some of which were also explored last round.

Visually, I am relieved, confident, and calm when I see so few categories. However, when I have a posting or reading need/desire and I consider where to put it, some of them such as Share seem busy and almost too much of a Swiss army knife. It is hard to have a strong opinion though since we do not have a lot of users posting yet and part of my perception and feelings are influenced by assumptions I have and ways I imagine this place could grow.

If having a separate Discussions category does not make sense, I feel influenced to desire a sensible amount of subcategories for more orderly navigation. Or tags! I just found a meta discussion on Discourse about Discourse and tags, those might be really useful if we're looking at location-based forum areas and for a lot of other purposes.

Categories and reasonable nests of subcategories are familiar to many in hierarchy's wide use, though, too.

I almost see resources and media as their own thing. When I think about resources, my inner shadetree librarian cries for lots of organization using different methods to suit different methods and purposes of retrieval. But maybe that is not so much of the point here, maybe part of this is an experiment in streaming interaction. I am also not familiar yet with different ways of retrieving and tagging posts in Discourse or LCL's fork of it.

There's a certain mischievousness about my attention span that really enjoys having a page with drastically-different types of content and media. A video here, then a picture, then a short essay, then an event announcement about something interesting, and so on. In the last LCL I really loved to look at a bunch of inspiring and positive projects, resources and discussions and share things myself just before or just after diving into a course assignment or challenge, it was invigorating and helped carry a momentum for me.

Mainly, I'm just really excited and want to try to help make it so that more people have a likelier chance of sharing and finding what they need. It is entirely possible that I am way overanalyzing things out of sleep deprivation and ignorance.

On that note, here's a wacky idea.. what if each user could customize how they saw the forums?

If SO tags and categories were integrated together and we made a whoooole bunch of tweaks on a fork, you could have 3 main views. One view looks just like it does now, just categories on the main page. There could be other blocks and commands, but more on that in a bit. One command could be to switch to tag view. This would take you to a clone portal using the same database that shows posts based on tags, with a focus on the ability to search tags, select multiple tags, etc. A third view could have a little of both. There could also be additional functions like set one of the views as your default view, edit what is shown on each view, save different versions of how each view is shown as a view profile that can be retrieved using meta-tags for specific purposes, share view profiles with others, add/remove categories and tags from different view profiles, and other functions. For the balanced view that shows posts by tag and category, that view by default could also share a focus with social activity notification within the Discourse system for that user. Make any block for a given view profile customizable. I don't know if that would do well here, that might do better for something with way more content of way more different types. Maybe it'd be too clunky and unusable no matter the purpose, I don't know. But I do like the idea of thinking about ways users can customize how they search for, view and interact in the interface itself. If we can figure out better and more ways that people with different habits, needs, and preferences can get different experiences in interface for their need while being able to interact as if nothing about interface were different with other users using the same system differently we might be bridging some important gaps. Can anyone help me make sense of anything I'm trying to say here? Just a wild idea, anyway. Maybe we could use tags at least, though, seriously.

Maybe someone else has some thoughts and feedback? What do you all think about how categories are set up?

What would you change? Would you add anything, remove anything, etc.?

Or do you like it how it is? What are your thoughts?

Should we just be patient and wait and see what they have planned for us already?

@James_B I agree with everything you have written in your post. Having participated in 5 moocs now, I see patterns that should provide mooc creators with useful data for making improvements.

Too many posting categories does make it confusing for new users. Those 10 categories you suggested are enough to keep things organized and this number may not be too confusing. More on this below.

I've watched participation and completion rates for moocs I've been involved with. So far I've not seen rates higher than 15 percent and the average number is closer to 10 percent. Higher rates of participation and completion come from courses where people are being led to do things. Courses heavy in the decimation of knowledge don’t go anywhere fast while courses that follow the YouTube video model where someone shows viewers how to do something, have vibrant participation.

Part of doing is participating using online discussion pieces. Another thing I’ve noticed is that no matter what size a course started as, they quickly become multiple small groups. The exception is when a course starts with a smaller number of participants, they wind up with a single small group of active participants.

Failure to understand how the discussion platform works does lead some number of people to give up when it comes to participating. They lurk and do benefit from these courses but not to the same degree as they would have if they had participated in a small group.

Making things self-evident is a big issue when it comes to software in general. When it comes to participation platforms that people can give a big ole thumbs up or more often, a big thumbs down, making things self-evident will be the difference between a thumbs up vs. a thumbs down. Users don't need more items in their lives to make life tougher for them.

The nature of these online courses means that everyone can’t participate in live events. So far I’ve not seen small groups organize within their small groups to view the live content as recorded content on a different small group schedule than the live schedule. If several dozen people can arrange their schedule so they can participate in the live event, it seems like a dozen people in a small group could arrange their schedules to participate at another coordinated time. This seems like something mooc creators would want to encourage constantly.

LCL1 had that gSpreadsheet where we put our personal information including the small group we were a part of. That contact spreadsheet is a must for a group as large as LCL1. Without something like this spreadsheet I can’t imagine how participants will self organize.

People have their preferences when it comes to online participation platforms. Trying to steer people towards a single platform probably results in less participation. Embracing all methods of participation ranging from IRC to Skype and Hangouts including Google Docs increases participation. My personal favorite participation platform is Rizzoma which is a child of Google Wave. Using multiple discussion pieces is the reality of the working world so mooc courses should encourage this type of rhizomatic participation\learning in each course.

Tags would be helpful for finding old posts. Bookmarks to categories instead of going to a home page might be something some would prefer. http://discuss-learn.media.mit.edu/category/share or http://discuss-learn.media.mit.edu/category/course-announcements

I come from a manufacturing background where Lean manufacturing or Lean Thinking is a major influencer in everything I do. Lean thinking is missing completely in education. When it comes to categorizing Lean may offer guidance but to do so those of us who think the solution to every problem is one more folder may have to change our perspectives. It’s possible that some number less than 10 is a better number for categorization but we may need tagging for more granular organization. Since everyone seems to be on-board with hashtags, then #tags may be the better way to organize than forcing people to think about where something belongs under a long list of folder or category names. In this case fewer categories will be the Lean directed way to go.

You can read comments by @1L2P here and see that he is thinking the same thoughts and asking the same questions you and I are.

@mpoole32

Wow, thanks for chiming in! Your post opened my perspective up to thinking about all this in different ways.

I have no experience with Google Wave or Rizzoma but I will check them out. I have never heard of Lean Thinking but it sounds very interesting.

I appreciate your thoughts and feedback. I reflect your concern about encouraging successful participation. Interface design is extremely important. Different people have different limits on accessibility and participation. Some factors may include time available, technical familiarity, and even just matters of confidence. If you are confident that the content you want to share will be appropriate for an area you have identified to place it, you have a much higher chance of participating.

It is also important not to focus on any one factor that may affect participation and overall success of a MOOC too much, though. You touched base on that, and I would like to add to it. As you suggest, the most inviting and sophisticated interface in the world does no good if there is not a rich enough assortment of ways to digest and interact with materials. Moderation and community guidelines can even affect participation and overall success. For instance, negativity, negatively-disruptive spam and derailed conversations can negatively impact both participation and overall success as well as any passive creative learning processes. There are a lot of factors that can encourage or stifle participation and overall success!

Speaking shortly (so as not to derail) of community guidelines, I myself can now look back and reflect some ways that I could have improved my own impact on successful participation and overall success in the last LCL. A few times, I posted content that ended up working to derail conversations, and a couple of times I even multi-posted content cross-category. It makes a lot of sense that those habits should have been better self-moderated and I am growing more conscious of my own habits, but it looks like there are new features now or that we are discussing that could help me effectively do some of the things I was trying to do without offering counterproductivity, like the current ability to split from a topic and explore a new conversation, ideas we are tossing around like a tag system versus or in tandem with a category system.

I do think it is important to avoid viewing active participation as the only important aspect of successful participation. We should also strive to keep in mind that lurking participants are still getting value. Some may be perfectly happy with that and entirely confident in their choice to lurk! That is more difficult to measure and track, but it is definitely there. Imagine the lurking Kindergarten teacher that never shares perspective, projects, art, or anything with us but returns to classroom of readily-imaginative youth with a brand new magical treasure trove of renewed vigor, outlook and resources.

I like that we are looking at ways of making it more comfortable and inviting for those that would want to share with us, though.

I look forward to more experiences with you here, I have already taken a lot out of just this conversation with you. I am going to explore different ways of stimulating useful and substantive participation shortly, I hope you join me. There are wells of creative energy hidden about here, let's see if can stumble on them and open them wide up. I'm going to go start an art jam thread, hope to see you there.

Our approach is to start with a minimal list and then create more categories as the discussions push beyond those categories and let the creation of new categories be driven by the activity on the site.

We are also planning to add categories to support the different themes of the course - as more materials become available.

@1L2P

Thanks, I will be patient. That sounds like a very open and inviting approach. I am excited to see how it all develops.

@mpoole32 Have you played around with the search feature (top right corner toolbar)? It is very helpful for finding old posts!

Tags are intentionally not a part of the Discourse platform, and if you are interested in understanding the reasoning on this, check out this post in the Meta Discourse Forum.

That makes a lot of sense. I can see why Discourse does not use tags currently out-of-box. I think there is a way to address the issues presented by the poster at meta.discourse and get unique function out of it, but perhaps not in Discourse for LCL and I will not press the issue here.

Also, while there are different online communities with different personalities and definitions of what is acceptable, I think it is more useful to focus on identifying problems as things and not people like we are doing here. In the link provided, some great points were brought up. It seems like while the author was frustrated, they made a point to avoid insulting other perspectives. Later on, this led to a repost of a related summary of what happens to forums with too many categories or category hierarchies that are too complex. In part, it seems this stems from an onslaught of some Discourse use that continues to try to push the abandoned tag system there as well as complicated subcategory hierarchies. It seems to be a common topic, sometimes renewed in duplicate threads. This might be frustrating for someone that has been there in the backend the whole way and informed others the same thing repeatedly when only once is necessary, but is both an example of great content that could have been more negative by insulting other habits and views and an illustration of how there are different perspectives on tags and category hierarchy in forums.

I would not say that just because everyone has a preference of how they learn and communicate means they know what's best for even themselves related to how they learn and communicate. I have a lot to work on myself for how I improve my best learning strategies to cater my learning styles and learning profile. Just as some learning needs may have different solutions than others, some environments may be better suited for some and some for others. There are multiple learning styles and strategies and no best solution.

Someday, possibly mostly due to search engines, all content and platforms will be interoperable if desired.

Right now, I could set up a Greasemonkey script to make it so that there is a tag system for my purposes or anyone else wanting to use tags here on LCL's Discourse. I do not have that ambition or span of time to dedicate, but if I did I could. Something like that would prompt me to ask first, but again, I am not interested in pursuing that. There are similar technologies to Greasemonkey that work to adapt interface for a user's custom needs, and more advances mean more interoperability as well. I could also make a Greasemonkey script that lets me use LCL's Discourse with FB features by pulling from my FB account. I'm pretty sure somewhere in the mix would be violating someone's terms if I didn't have permission and I don't want to do that, but again the point being that these things are possible and only advancing.

All this ties in with the main topic at hand, as categories could theoretically be set up to show differently to different people for different purposes. Maybe more on custom category views will be relevant once AI and user algorithms advance more, as well.

One big takeaway I pulled from the link provided is that allowing users to populate and control structure can make it a trainwreck to moderate with larger groups, such as changes to how tags work at Stack Exchange. Perhaps automated IT/IS will help with solutions later down the road.

Another big takeaway from the link for me is how interface design affects participation. Myself, I may be in a minority of people that prefer customization but I also think there are sensible solutions and terrain left to explore more in customizable interface design related to forum view structure.

For now, I am excited to see how the categories get used and develop over this LCL. Thanks for discussing this with me!

Other perspectives and discussion welcome, but it looks like we will not be exploring tags in Discourse in this LCL.