Day 12: Still lonely in the labyrinth.

The "recent activity" stream for "everyone" (not sure just what that means - everyone in this class?), shows that our T.A. Brent is now diligently leaving comments for lots of people, but I wonder if they will ever see his comments since they will get no notification about it. I wonder, in fact, how many people are actually still participating. I posted my assignment for today in the online resource area and commented on the one other assignment I found there. I also posted a comment on the one other essay that someone had posted, although he had not commented on my essay. As I learned from his post, he is also enrolled in the for-credit course apparently, so perhaps he is doing all his commenting in the for-credit area; that would certainly be understandable since presumably it is less grim there than it is here in the open course.

So, as I said in yesterday's diary entry, there is simply no feeling of social here at all really. Between the lack of notifications and the apparently dwindling-to-non-existent participation in the open side of this course, this doesn't feel any different than the way I would work on my own, reading and writing in my blog about what I've learned.

In fact, it is worse than reading and blogging, because my blog is something I can share with other people in my online learning network (that's why I am crossposting here). In contrast, I cannot share anything inside the Janux walled garden at all with the outside world. Indeed, I don't think I can link to things even when I am inside Janux; at least, I have not been able to figure out if anything is directly linkable in there or not.

Of course, the argument made by Janux boosters is that because of this "unique" social software we should be willing to trade away the undeniable benefits of open learning. Based on the two weeks of this class so far, I would say that looks like the worst kind of devil's bargain. Instead of having Kerry's great learning materials available to anyone, any time on the open Internet, they are locked away ... for no good reason. Instead of having materials that can be indexed by search engines and thus discovered by others, they are unreachable and undiscoverable by others.

What a shame. The social aspects of the Janux so-called community would have to be enormous to convince me that such a trade-off is even worth considering. As it is, with Janux being so poorly designed (no notifications...? what were they thinking?), it seems to me a terrible shame that OU instructors have invested so much time and effort in developing materials to put inside the Janux walls instead of developing truly open resources.

In addition, I should note that my "Recent Activity" is still broken; the most recent item showing is still the old assignment dated January 19. None of my activity since then is showing up, which means I have little faith in the "recent activity" stream that I guess is supposed to be the key to how I am supposed to interact with others in the course in the absence of actual notifications.

Finally, for what it's worth, I had asked about notifications all the way back in September when we were first allowed to log on to Janux to look around; here is a screenshot of the "thought" I added back then in response to someone named Nathalie who works for NextThought. I never got a reply to this comment, presumably because Natalie never knew that I left the comment . . . since she didn't get a notification about it.