I am sure that there are many of us who are not lurkers, but just very busy. We follow the threads through our email notifications. How can we make it easier for those people to contribute?
Jo Ann and Jeffrey (and a couple thousand others!
) are involved in the CCK08 course. Several of us are also taking the FOC08 course. It has 74 on the roster so is a little more manageable. I mention these 2 courses because the issue of entry and re-entry into the course has been a big topic there.Bronwyn Stuckey crafted an interesting blog post on this topic: Lost or left behind in online learning? Nancy White then offered some catch up strategies. These folks are talking about full online courses, but I wonder if some strategies would apply to SCoPE seminars?
And then again sometimes it feels like composing a forum post feels like too much effort. Here are some quick ideas for ways that busy people can contribute:
- Integrate some quick polls related to the seminar topic. Everybody has time to click a radio button :-)
- Assign a tag to each seminar. Peripheral participants can use it in backchannel chatter (like twitter), to contribute resources via delicious, include in a blog post, etc.
- Always have a seminar wiki -- easy to slide in to add a point or two.
- Annotate existing posts. Add quick notes that come to mind while reading, or flag items you wish to revisit when you have more time. (More about this later -- we're just doing maintenance on the site and the annotation tool needs to be reinstalled)