Day 9: effects of no notifications

I've returned for a quick visit tonight - I did some reading in Lindberg last night which I really enjoyed, and I watched the video about the Collection's oldest object (very cool), and then I posted my quick reflections about that in the discussion board. My motivation to participate in the discussion boards is really low, though - with the lack of notifications, what can we really expect there?

I am discouraged to make my own posts because I don't expect they will lead to any real dialogue. Most of the things I have posted so far have received no comments; I think I got one comment on my Week 1 posting that included two books, but that is the only comment I've received. At least, I think so - how would I know? Without notifications, I have no way to be sure. I cannot even check using my recent activity stream because that is incorrect and incomplete: my so-called recent activity shows only one item total out of the six assignments that I've posted in different discussion boards, nor does my Introduction post show up, and there is also no sign of the comments I've made on other people's posts (I've followed Kerry's instructions to leave a couple of comments on existing posts when I add my own post to a discussion board).

I am also discouraged to leave comments for others because, without notifications, I have little confidence that they will see my comment. I did leave one comment for someone which led to a reply, but I think that is the only reply there has been to one of my comments... although again, I am not sure. Without notifications, how would I know? It's very frustrating to leave comments when there is really no expectation that the other person will know you have left them a comment.

Lack of conversation is apparently the norm: at the Introductions board, there are 37 Introduction posts. Of those, 27 have no comments at all. There are comments on 10 of them, but only on 5 of those is there a reply from the original poster; presumably the other people who did get comments have no idea that they got comments. Because... without notifications... how would they? I'm also not sure what is going on there. At one point we were told that this Introductions board was for both the for-credit and not-for-credit versions of the class, and I did indeed meet some for-credit students at that discussion board. But where are the rest of the Introductions? If there are 50 people in the for-credit class, I would expect they would all be there, even if participation is low (almost non-existent apparently) for the not-for-credit students.

In my own classes, I have opted for blogs rather than discussion boards exactly because of the dilemma posed by the discussion board format. With a blog, at least you can quickly see what is going on, and you also have the satisfaction of watching your own work accumulate over the semester (as I can see my assignments here because I am crossposting them in this blog). With discussion boards, your contributions get scattered hither and thither, and you cannot even easily find them later. Being scattered would be worth it if those contributions were part of an actual discussion, but with the poor design of the Janux software, discussion is very difficult, and this is not even a large class. I shudder to think what is going on in the classes much larger than this.

I never thought I would say this... but it makes me miss the Coursera discussion boards, where at least you could quickly see at a glance who had posted and keep track of the latest comments quickly and easily. Not possible here at Janux.

Sigh.